Tag: holiday

Meta: Happy New Year From Linux-Tips!

So, it’s the start of a new year from Linux-Tips! Hopefully, your life is going well and you have grand plans (that you’ll accomplish) in the coming year. Now is the time to make those promises to yourself, or so they say. I’ve never had much luck with New Year’s Resolutions, but you might.

Which makes me ask this:

What plans do you have for your Linux computing in the new year?

You could resolve to learn Bash scripting or spend more time in the terminal. If such is your goal, you could resolve to spend time helping your favorite project. Another goal could be learning something new throughout the year, specifically about Linux.

You could also resolve to read this site every other day by signing up for the newsletter! LOL! You could even donate to cover some of the bandwidth costs at Linux-Tips! If forums are your thing, you could head on over to Linux.org to sign up for an account. There are all sorts of things to get you started on a new year’s worth of Linux learning.

Me? I’m going to keep doing what I do. I’ll continue writing more material for Linux-Tips. I’ll continue working within the community, as I already do. I enjoy giving my time to the community and so I do.

This site? I don’t want to turn this into one of those meta articles, but we’ve experienced 61% growth in unique visitors and 69% in visits. That’s pretty sweet considering the number of people complaining about Google’s more recent updates. (I get the vast majority of my traffic from search engines, specifically Google.)

So, we’ve had a pretty good year. I’ve enjoyed watching the growth and I’ll soon be posting the 500th article (which will be a real meta article). That’s an exciting accomplishment, in my opinion. Feel free to share your opinion.

Let’s have some fun in the terminal to celebrate the new year!

Happy New Year In The Terminal:

First, we want to install Figlet (FIGlet, technically – I think). You’ll need an open terminal, but that’s often accomplished by pressing the CTRL + ALT + T buttons on your keyboard. 

With your terminal now open, follow the appropriate instructions:

Debian/Ubuntu/etc:

RHEL/CentOS/etc:

So, yeah, that’s all that I can be sure of. Your distro may have this as well.

But, when you get Figlet installed, type the following into your terminal:

You should get an output similar to this:

There… (Hit the expand button, if you must. And you probably must.)

A nice and easy way to celebrate New Year’s Day is with your Linux terminal and an application known as Figlet. You’ve learned nothing of importance. You’ve spent little time. And, well, you’ve got a holiday to celebrate or recover from. (Unless you’re on the other side of the planet, in which case this is a day late.)

HINT: Use man figlet to find the many other text formatting options. This should keep you amused for at least a few minutes. There’s more to the output than what I’ve demonstrated in a simple holiday article.

Closure:

Well, we’ve learned to use Figlet to celebrate the new year in the Linux terminal. It’s something so simple, that anyone can do it – assuming it’s in your default repositories. If it isn’t, you could try the Toilet application or you could compile the application. Both of those seem reasonably fun.

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Revisiting Christmas In The Terminal

Well, it’s the day before Christmas and a Linux Christmas can mean having Christmas in the terminal. If you do not celebrate the holiday, that’s fine. You can skip this article and move along. If you do celebrate this holiday, you might as well have a Merry Linux Christmas!

Last year, we had Christmas in the terminal. This year, we’ll be doing the same thing – but not in the same way. If you want an easier and quicker way to have Christmas in the terminal, you should follow along with the first article. This one is quite a bit more involved.

Let’s Have Christmas In The Terminal

That one is nice and easy! I’m also writing this article quite a ways ahead of time. I’ll schedule it for the nearest possible day. Due to my publication schedule, this won’t be published on the holiday itself.

NOTE: I did this on Linux Mint 21.2, Cinnamon Edition. That just happened to be the computer I was using. You may not need all of these steps if you’re using a different distro. You may already have things like Go and Git available.

We’ll be playing with all sorts of silliness and doing things we’d not normally do on this site. I’ll give clear directions, as much as I can. I won’t be diving into details like I have lately. This is a holiday article and ain’t nobody got time for that!

Linux Christmas In The Terminal:

You will need an open terminal. As I did this in Mint, I was able to open a terminal by just pressing CTRL + ALT + T which is something you too should be able to do in most distros.

With your terminal now open, let’s get into a good directory:

Next, we’ll install Git.

Then we’ll download some files with Git.

Now we move to the new directory:

This is in the language known as Go, so let’s get set up to compile that.

Now we’ll do some compilation magic.

Let that finish and run this command:

With any luck, you’ll see something like this in your terminal:

Tada! It even has blinking lights! That’s a rather festive terminal!

You can exit the program by pressing CTRL + C.

Of course, you can move the ctree file anywhere you want. If you want to just run it from the terminal, copy it to /usr/local/bin and you can do that. This being a temporary thing, I saw no reason to move the binary to a special location. If you do want to just run it anywhere in the terminal, you’d use this command:

Enjoy your holiday celebrations!

Closure:

I don’t think this can become a tradition or anything like that. There are only so many Christmas-themed things out there that you can do in the terminal. I didn’t create this and I have no idea what I’ll be able to find for the next Christmas. We’ll have to wait and see what next year brings. Until then, keep being you!

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Let’s Have A Happy New Year In The Terminal

Today’s article is going to be just another fun article, where we have a happy New Year in the terminal. Why in the terminal? Because, why not in the terminal? If you want to celebrate the New Year holiday in the terminal, read on and see how.

You won’t learn much in this article, but it can tie back to a couple of previous articles. This is just a fun article. As for articles it might tie into, check these previous articles:

Add A Message Of the Day (MOTD) To SSH
How To: Show An SSH Banner

If you read those two articles, or somehow remember them, you’ll see a common theme mentioned – that is ‘ASCII’. ASCII stands for “American Standard Code for Information Interchange”. Or, in plain language, text.

Text, terminal, and a New Year celebration? Darned right, we’re gonna have fun. Well, maybe not too much fun… But, I promise it won’t be too educational.

Yes, I realize that there are a variety of calendars on the planet. Yes, I know that there are other New Year celebrations. If this isn’t your New Year holiday, though this will technically be posted on my New Year’s Eve day, you can save this article and celebrate it when your holiday rolls around.

So, with all that in mind, let’s go ahead and get into the article…

Happy New Year In The Terminal:

You guessed it, you need an open terminal! So, open one up. If you don’t know how to open the terminal, you can do so with your keyboard – just press CTRL + ALT + T and your default terminal should open.

With your terminal now open, install ‘figlet’.

APT using distros:

YUM using distros:

DNF using distros:

You may find ‘figlet’ available for other distros. If you do, you should install it before going on. You will need ‘figlet’ for the remainder of this article.

With ‘figlet’ now installed, you can check the man page:

We’ll just be using a couple of features available with ‘figlet’, but the man page is pretty informative. You can do quite a bit with ‘figlet’.

Using figlet:

While still in your terminal, you can just use ‘figlet’ in its most basic form:

The output of that command should look similar to this image:

figlet displaying a banner in the terminal
See? You have your terminal saying Happy New Year! Festive, huh?!?

You can also use ‘figlet’ by loading the data from the file. It’s easy enough to use ‘figlet’ to display information from a file, I’ll show you. Let’s use one of my favorites, nano:

Let’s start by making the file:

Add the following text:

Now save the file with nano. That’s pretty easy, but I’ll show you. Just press CTRL + X, then Y, and then ENTER. That should save the file as ‘hny’ in whatever directory you were working in.

So, let’s use ‘figlet’ to show the contents of our ‘hny’ file:

There you have it. If you go back to the article’s introduction, you’ll see a couple of links. In those instances, you can actually call ‘figlet’ to show the contents of a file, for things like an SSH banner. They all kinda tie together, if you want them to.

Closure:

And there you have it. You have another article. This time, you’ve learned nothing – except how to have a happy New Year in the terminal. Well, you’ve also learned a bit about ‘figlet’, which is nice. Either way, enjoy the holiday and thanks for sticking with me throughout the past year!

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History: How Linux Got The Name “Linux”

If you’ve ever wondered how Linux got the name Linux, then wonder no longer, as this article will tell you about Linux’s naming history. It’ll be a relatively quick and easy article, which is perfect for today.

Assuming I scheduled this properly, this article will be published on America’s holiday, “Thanksgiving.” I suppose that means two things – thanks and giving. So, I’m thankful for Linux and I’m giving you this article explaining how Linux got its name.

This article was almost all copied directly from Wikipedia. That’ll save some time and effort! And, really, they detail it better than I could.

How Linux Got The Name Linux:

Quoting straight from Wikipedia:

Linus Torvalds had wanted to call his invention “Freax”, a portmanteau of “free”, “freak”, and “x” (as an allusion to Unix). During the start of his work on the system, some of the project’s makefiles included the name “Freax” for about half a year. Torvalds had already considered the name “Linux”, but initially dismissed it as too egotistical.

In order to facilitate development, the files were uploaded to the FTP server (ftp.funet.fi) of FUNET in September 1991. Ari Lemmke, Torvalds’ coworker at the Helsinki University of Technology (HUT), who was one of the volunteer administrators for the FTP server at the time, did not think that “Freax” was a good name, so he named the project “Linux” on the server without consulting Torvalds.[52] Later, however, Torvalds consented to “Linux”.

According to a newsgroup post by Torvalds,[9] the word “Linux” should be pronounced (/ˈlɪnʊks/ (About this soundlisten) LIN-uuks) with a short ‘i’ as in ‘print’ and ‘u’ as in ‘put’. To further demonstrate how the word “Linux” should be pronounced, he included an audio guide (About this soundlisten (help·info)) with the kernel source code.[53] Contradictory, in this recording, he pronounces ‘Linux’ (/ˈlinʊks/ (About this soundlisten) LEEN-uuks with a short but close unrounded front vowel.

And there you have it. That’s how Linux got the name Linux – and how to pronounce it, in case you didn’t already know.

And, wow am I grateful for Linux. Linux has brought me so many things and has opened so many doors. So, I’m gonna take a minute to also thank those who have helped get me here. Thank you. You know who you are. Thanks!

Closure:

Yup… This isn’t much of an article, but it is an article! I deserve an easy day or two. It’s the holidays and I’ve been particularly well behaved this year. Also, I’ve been exceptionally busy this year. Don’t worry, there won’t be too many articles like this.

Thanks for reading! If you want to help, or if the site has helped you, you can donate, register to help, write an article, or buy inexpensive hosting to start your own site. If you scroll down, you can sign up for the newsletter, vote for the article, and comment.

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