Useful and Fun things to do with the Ubuntu Terminal
Posted by admin on December 20th, 2007
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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
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December 21st, 2007 at 4:08 am
I love this website , thanks man.
December 21st, 2007 at 1:31 pm
LMAO - ascii star wars rules… great post mate
December 25th, 2007 at 9:15 pm
Thanks a lot
December 30th, 2007 at 7:13 pm
Neat stuff, but how do you turn of that dang little fish?
woody
May 8th, 2008 at 2:28 pm
Click on the fish!
July 22nd, 2008 at 12:37 am
thanks a lot your great!!!!!!!!
I got a lot of help from u