HYIP-Man: Useful and Fun things to do with the Ubuntu Terminal
Thursday, January 03, 2008
Useful and Fun things to do with the Ubuntu Terminal
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

source:ubuntugeek.com

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