How to jazz up your remote login terminal with fortune

[crazybill]

Getting bored with the same dull login terminal when you do remote administration to your Hoary Ubuntu Linux computer? I figured out how to jazz it up some.

First, you should find an interesting random-quote/fortune/joke program at
/usr/games/fortune

Fortune is a neat program that yields adages, fortunes, quotes, humor, etc in a "random" fashion.

First you want to make sure that the binary command fortune is in a path defined by the bash shell's envionmental variable, $PATH

The easiest way to do that is

# cp /usr/games/fortune /usr/bin/fortune

Now, the fortune command should run from any directory with simply typing fortune
Here is an example run:

teacher@ubuntu4:~ $ fortune
Always do right.  This will gratify some people and astonish the rest.
                -- Mark Twain

Now we are set to run fortune at setup. The key is to modify the file, /etc/bash.bashrc

You will edit /etc/bash.bashrc by adding "fortune" to the bottom of the bash configuration file and save it, such as you see I did here:

teacher@ubuntu4:~ $ tail /etc/bash.bashrc

export JAVA_HOME
PATH=$PATH:$JAVA_HOME/bin
export PATH
fortune

Now everytime you log into your server in the bash shell, you will get fortune greeting you with humor, wisdom, and wit.