Useful and Fun things to do with the Ubuntu Terminal

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If you want to have fun with ubuntu terminal this is for you

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

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21 Responses

  1. sx66gns says:

    I love this website , thanks man.

  2. bungle says:

    LMAO – ascii star wars rules… great post mate 🙂

  3. Abbas Adel says:

    Thanks a lot

  4. woody says:

    Neat stuff, but how do you turn of that dang little fish?

    woody

  5. Ian says:

    Click on the fish!

  6. Zekoo says:

    thanks a lot your great!!!!!!!!

    I got a lot of help from u

  7. phildbole says:

    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

  8. phildbole says:

    clicking that fish only seems to make him run

  9. Sai says:

    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”?

  10. bchzd2 says:

    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.

  11. Sai says:

    “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.

  12. bchzd2 says:

    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.

  13. ainwis says:

    fun+excellent..!

  14. Lapog says:

    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.

  15. fraktik says:

    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….

  16. fraktik says:

    Curl must be installed:

    sudo apt-get install curl

  17. fraktik says:

    sudo apt-get install acpi
    sudo apt-get install finger
    sudo apt-get install aptitude

    In Unity “free the fish” dont work.

  18. fraktik says:

    PS: Last and fresh (& standart) Ubuntu 11.10

  19. hendra says:

    @fraktik
    that’s incorrect, type sudo apt-get install cowsay

  20. forgotten says:

    look at this cool combination:
    watch -t -n 1 “sudo iwlist scanning | grep ESSID | cowsay”

  21. artem says:

    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

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