Useful and Fun things to do with the Ubuntu Terminal
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Entertainment
Watch Star Wars
telnet towel.blinkenlights.nl
Chat with a bot
telnet the-funk.net 7000
Custom ascii text
banner
See how long your machine has been running
uptime
To see the arbitrary precision calculator (7^500 is interesting! That's 7 to the 500th power)
bc
Must enter below code to use the next few
sudo apt-get install cowsaySee
your fortune
fortune
Use cowsay (replace “message” with your own text in single quotes)
cowsay ‘message'
Cowsay your Amarok lyrics
dcop amarok player lyrics | cowsay
Must enter below code to use the next few
sudo apt-get emacs21
To play ‘snake'
emacs21
Once emacs21 opens, hit...
Esc>>”X”
Type in...
snake
To play ‘tetris'
emacs21
Once emacs21 opens, hit...
Esc>>”X”
Type in...
tetris
Useful
Show some computer stats
lspci
Access a dictionary through terminal (must have a working internet connection)
Note: Replace ‘word' with whatever you'd like to search for (without quotes)
curl dict://dict.org/d:word
Check system temperature and battery charge
acpi -t
See a list of all running processes
ps aux
View the current time, date, and year
date
Show a simple calendar
cal
See what programs are running with the path names
ps -aux
See your current IP address
ifconfig -a
See what your system is doing at startup
dmesg
Show information about the computer users
finger -l
Show current Ubuntu version
cat /etc/issue
System Recovery
Backup xorg.conf
sudo cp /etc/X11/xorg.conf /etc/X11/xorg.conf_backup
Replace current xorg.conf with a previously made backup
sudo cp /etc/X11/xorg.conf_backup /etc/X11/xorg.conf
Delete auto xorg.conf backups
sudo rm /etc/X11/xorg.conf.2007*
Use nano to edit xorg.conf (works in “terminal-only” mode)
sudo nano /etc/X11/xorg.conf
Keyboard Shortcuts
Terminal keyboard shortcut for paste
Ctrl>>Shift>>Alt>>”V”
Or...
Shift>>Insert
Advanced Users Only
Open up a file browser with all privileges
gksudo nautilus
Edit color options (advanced users only)
gedit .gtkrc-2.0
Give a .sh file executable priveledges
chmod +x
To clear all of the past commands you have run in the terminal history type:
history -c
If you use GNOME
Alt+F2 in your keyboard
and then type "free the fish"
SUPER COW POWERS
aptitude -h
Read the last line
apt-get moo
aptitude moo
aptitude -v moo
aptitude -v -v moo
aptitude -v -v -v moo
aptitude -v -v -v -v moo
aptitude -v -v -v -v -v moo
apt-get moo
Debian's Top Secret List of planned Release Names
zcat /usr/share/doc/linux-image-`uname -r`/changelog.Debian.gz | egrep -e "Release"
zgrep "The.*Release" /usr/share/doc/dpkg/changelog.Debian.gz
I love this website , thanks man.
LMAO – ascii star wars rules… great post mate 🙂
Thanks a lot
Neat stuff, but how do you turn of that dang little fish?
woody
Click on the fish!
thanks a lot your great!!!!!!!!
I got a lot of help from u
hey how do i get that fish off my machine…?
I can add and remove them from the panel, but the one i ran in comand lind i cant find to remove…help he is quite annoying
clicking that fish only seems to make him run
Eh. It’s a nitpick, but one I gotta point out.
With the exception of the apt-get/aptitude commands (They most likely work in Debian too), this is really nothing that any other Linux distro can’t do. My beef is with your title. “Ubuntu terminal”.
While I realize this site is about a Ubuntu user, you should take care to not give undue credit. At least mention that other distrobutions can do most of those commands. (Even Windows can do the telnet commands at the top.)
So maybe a better title would have been: “Useful and fun things to do with the Terminal”?
Someone please shoot Sai and bury his jealous altruistic attitude. Just because you don’t use (or maybe even understand) Ubuntu and it’s pretty obvious on the commands, doesn’t mean we need a demeaning attitude. The site is aimed towards Ubuntu users so get over it. Man I hate fucking morons. Useful things to do in a terminal? Wait. 95% of this wouldn’t work in a windows term so get it right buddy. Just shut up before you say something else unintelligble. No go and breath spaz. I enjoyed the post even knowing most of this, yet did learn a few new ones. Thanks.
“Someone please shoot Sai and bury his jealous altruistic attitude. Just because you don’t use (or maybe even understand) Ubuntu and it’s pretty obvious on the commands, doesn’t mean we need a demeaning attitude. The site is aimed towards Ubuntu users so get over it. Man I hate fucking morons. Useful things to do in a terminal? Wait. 95% of this wouldn’t work in a windows term so get it right buddy. Just shut up before you say something else unintelligble. No go and breath spaz. I enjoyed the post even knowing most of this, yet did learn a few new ones. Thanks.”
Jesus H. Christ. It’s users like you who give Linux a bad name. :/
I’ve used Ubuntu. I’ve used Ubuntu studio. I just happen to prefer Debian over Ubuntu. You assumed I have no experience with Ubuntu (In fact, you assumed a lot of things.)
And what is with this “Windows terminal” cock you’re spewing? I said “Give credit to other L-I-N-U-X distributions.” The telnet commands are about the the only that would work in Windows in this post.
I know this is a Ubuntu site, I even said that in my post! (Did you actually read it fully?)
Again, my only beef is that I got the notion that he was playing the commands as Ubuntu only. I offered a suggesstion, and you flipped out.
Like I said before, the only ‘debian/ubuntu’ specific commands are the apt-get ones. All the others would work in a terminal on Gentoo/Slackware/.
You’d think I shot Linus Torvalds with this user’s reaction.
As stated Sai. This is an Ubuntu forum? Quit bitchin because you’re wrong. Yes 99% of these will work on any distro, I agree on that except for the apt-get. But let me again point out the obvious. Ubuntu forum. Scroll to the top if you don’t believe.
How freakin’ retarded can ya be. And I think Torvalds will be OK
Sorry if ya took it the wrong way. Yeah my dumbass said win term…funny stuff.
fun+excellent..!
To ‘kill’ the fish,
Press Alt+F2 again and enter “killall gnome-panel” (without quotes, ofcourse). Don’t worry, the panel will blink and will be back.
Cant install cowsaySee:
~$ sudo apt-get install cowsaySee
…reading…
…depencency tree…
reading info… Done
E: Cannot find packed cowsaySee
The message is in original in Czech on my (lokalized) Ububntu, so sry for not exact translation….
Curl must be installed:
sudo apt-get install curl
sudo apt-get install acpi
sudo apt-get install finger
sudo apt-get install aptitude
In Unity “free the fish” dont work.
PS: Last and fresh (& standart) Ubuntu 11.10
@fraktik
that’s incorrect, type sudo apt-get install cowsay
look at this cool combination:
watch -t -n 1 “sudo iwlist scanning | grep ESSID | cowsay”
Fancy meta tags radio stream output, For real geeks who like terminal 😉
http://ai-radio.org/chronos/2015-05-31-fancy_meta_tags_output
#$ ogg123 http://ai-radio.org
or
#$ wget -qO- http://ai-radio.org/128.opus | opusdec – – | aplay -qfdat
#$ curl -sLN http://ai-radio.org/320.opus | opusdec – – | aplay -qfdat
output
http://ai-radio.org/chronos/.media/fancy_meta.gif