Easter eggs in Ubuntu

I just found out about the free the fish easter egg available in Ubuntu:

Press Alt + F2
Enter this: free the fish

Are there any more easter eggs available in Ubuntu? What are they?

19 Answers

Here is another package that is just a joke : sl, standing for Steam Locomotive.

Just download sl and then run sl in a terminal.

It has been designed for people confusing ls and sl. See manual page for more exciting features!

Watch Star Wars in terminal telnet towel.blinkenlights.nl

Not gonna spoil it for you with a screenshot, but in a terminal try: apt-get moo

And then, if you have aptitude installed take a look at:

aptitude moo
aptitude -v moo
aptitude -vv moo
aptitude -vvv moo
(etc)

(Bonus: if you enjoy this then install cowsay for hours of command-line entertainment!)

For 11.04 and earlier:

Press Alt + F2
Type in gegls from outer space and hit enter.

I just found a quite funny mix between "cowsay" and "fortune":
First, install both cowsay and fortune

sudo apt-get install cowsay fortune-mod

Now, pass fortune as the argument for cowsay:

fortune | cowsay

A cow will now tell you something clever about life ;) Have fun!

enter image description here

Lord of The Rings Easter Egg

Open Terminal
type calendar -f /usr/share/calendar/calendar.lotr -A 365 and hit Enter

LoTR Easter Egg

You can also try these

calendar -f /usr/share/calendar/calendar.pagan -A 365

calendar -f /usr/share/calendar/calendar.music -A 365

calendar -f /usr/share/calendar/calendar.computer -A 365

calendar -f /usr/share/calendar/calendar.history -A 365

You can get a list of all calendars available by:

ls /usr/share/calendar/

apt-get moo

alt text

Python

import this

enter image description here

In Firefox, go to about:robots

OO.org (doesn't work in LO rc4 on MAverick):

Clicking on the fish with the mouse will make it go away, to get rid of it for good. you can type killall gnome-panel into the terminal. Also, as an easter egg, it is an undocumented feature.

BONUS: Did you know that, the US Federal Government will not use any software that has undocumented features (aka Easter Eggs)?

The meaning of life

In vim type :help 42 in the command field

You can see some ubuntu easter egss in the links below..

Try to install emacs and then press ESC+x (when you've started emacs) (M-x) and then write butterfly for some advanced butterfly magic ;)

I also found a couple too, check them out.
Tested and working in Ubuntu 14.04 LTS:

1. aafire - burn up your terminal

sudo apt-get install libaa-bin
aafire

2. oneko - have an animal chase your cursor.

sudo apt-get install oneko
oneko

3. xeyes - have a pair of eyes follow your cursor around.

xeyes

4. cmatrix - the matrix code on your terminal

sudo apt-get install cmatrix
cmatrix

5. bb - well, it does interesting stuff

sudo apt-get install bb
bb

I really liked lolcat:

sudo apt-get install lolcat
echo {a..z}{a..z}{a..z} | lolcat

Hint: rainbows.

Back on the ASCII art vein there is toilet:

sudo apt-get install toilet
echo abcdef | toilet

man toilet reveals a wealth of options.

Some of bsdgames could be classified as Easter eggs:

sudo apt-get install bsdgames
pom
number 123
primes 1 100

but the most part are just too awesome to be just Easter eggs.

sudo Default insults:

sudo visudo
Add a line Defaults insults

Now whenever you make a password mistake, sudo makes witty remarks about your intelligence or typing skills.

Learnt from Network World. All others on their top 11 were already here :-)

Open System Settings (unity-control-center if using Unity or gnome-control-center if using GNOME)
Click on "Mouse & Touchpad"
Click on "Test Your Settings"
Scroll to the top of the image: you'll see a nice kite
Scroll to the bottom of the image; click on the inner circle five times (quickly); you'll see that the text below the circles changes
Quickly scroll to the top of the image again!

ddate is short for Discordian calendar, which was the calendar of an old cult that worshipped the Greek god of chaos, Eris (thanks @tox123).

I noticed this when mistyping the date. In a terminal, run

ddate

Today is Sweetmorn, the 13th day of Discord in the YOLD 3181

nmap has one too, to format output in s|<rIpt kIddi3 style:

$ nmap -oS - scanme.nmap.org
$taRt1ng Nmap 6.40 ( ) at 2015-03-27 19:22 C3T
NMap sCaN report F0r $cAnm3.nmap.Org (74.207.244.221)
H0$t !z up (0.17z laT3ncy).
N0T Shown: 995 f|ltEr3D p0Rt$
P0RT $TaTE s3RvIC3
80/tcP op3n htTp
443/Tcp cl0$ed HtTps
6667/tcp cl0$3d 1Rc
6969/tcp Cl0S3d acmS0da
8333/TCp cl0seD unknOwn
Nmap Done: 1 iP addreSz (1 ho$t Up) scannEd !n 10.14 S3cONdz

Unicode U+E0FF is displayed as the "Circle Of Friends" logo and U+F200 is "ubuntu" in the Ubuntu (typeface) on Ubuntu. Type: Ctrl-Shift-U, then F200 or E0FF in Gedit or Pluma. The characters are in the Unicode Private Use Area so they may display differently depending on which font you have selected. Here are both, they don't display on askubuntu.com, copy/paste to your regular text editor: