Make your Linux terminal cool

Terminal can be boring at times. What if we could add little fun factor to dull terminal? That is what I was wondering since last few days.

On Ubantu Linux a dynamic message just like motd or to be precise a welcome message  can be displayed each time you start a terminal instance even when in GUI mode ( whereas /etc/motd message is shown only on tty or at remote logins.

For example, greeting like in following image each time you start terminal :

Installation Procedure:

We are going to use two programs namely “fortune” which generates random quotes and “cowsay” which adds some pictures with bubble over its head, just like in cartoons published in newspapers.

sudo aptitude install fortune cowsay

Configuration :

Sample run of “fortune | cowsay -n”

 

If you wish to see messages like above but random ones each time you start a new Terminal, you have to edit /etc/bash.bashrc file. Open it with root privileges :

sudo gedit /etc/bash.bashrc

and add following lines at the end of the file

# Spicing up Terminal
fortune | cowsay -n
echo

Open new Terminal instance and the quote/motd should be displayed.

Further Customization :
If you want to have static greeting message, add following at the end of /etc/bash.bashrc file

# Spicing up Terminal
cowsay YourTextHere
echo

which produces :

 

cowsay comes with more fun pictures. The list can be found at /usr/share/cowsay/cows/

 

If you like any of above cartoons, then your modified line to be added in /etc/bash.bashrc file will be :

fortune | cowsay -n -f tux.cow

Enjoy your new spicy Terminal!

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Make Motion detector webcam with Linux

What you need:
  • Ubuntu Linux ( I was using 10.10 at the time of installation )
  • One or More USB web cameras
What you can do:
  • Motion detection – record video/and or frames if there is motion.
  • Snapshot intervals – take time interval snapshots regardless of motion detection.
  • Live video IP stream in mjpeg format.
  • Specify recorded video to be saved in your choice mpeg, avi, flv, swf format.
  • When motion exists, have frames and videos draw a box around the specific motion for more obvious recognition of subtle movements ( this actually shows the shadow of the janitor near the door around 6 a.m. every morning – I wouldn’t have noticed otherwise! )
  • Easily send all data to a backup server in a variety of ways – I keep it simple by saving data to my dropbox directory, a wonderful cross-platform data syncronization and sharing utility.
Steps:

1.  Plugin your webcam.

For me, the Logitect Pro 9000 worked right

2.  Install Motion – software motion detector, and turn it on.

sudo apt-get install motion
sudo motion

3. Configure Motion

Everything really works out of the box with this – but isn’t quite organized to my liking, and probably not yours either. Global configuration is located inside /etc/motion.conf ( You’ll notice there are multiple threadN.conf files in this directory – which can be used for custom configured individual cameras if you are setting up more than one ).

Note: Be sure to restart the Motion server everytime you make a configuration change.

sudo /etc/init.d/motion restart

Take a look at the files, they are well documented. Below are a few helpful configurations to get your data organized quicker:

#/etc/motion/motion.conf

# Locate and draw a box around the moving object.
locate on

# Draws the timestamp using same options as C function strftime(3)
text_right %Y-%m-%dn%T-%q

# Text is placed in lower left corner
text_left SECURITY CAMERA %t - Office

Organize the filesytem to save data by date, instead of all in one directory.

# File path for snapshots (jpeg or ppm) relative to target_dir
snapshot_filename %Y%m%d/camera-%t/snapshots/hour-%H/camera-%t-%v-%Y%m%d%H%M%S-snapshot

# File path for motion triggered images (jpeg or ppm) relative to target_dir
jpeg_filename %Y%m%d/camera-%t/motions/hour-%H/camera-%t-%v-%Y%m%d%H%M%S-%q-motion

# File path for motion triggered ffmpeg films (mpeg) relative to target_dir
movie_filename %Y%m%d/camera-%t/movies/hour-%H/camera-%t-%v-%Y%m%d%H%M%S-movie

# File path for timelapse mpegs relative to target_dir
timelapse_filename %Y%m%d/camera-%t/timelapses/hour-%H/camera-%t-%Y%m%d-timelapse

4.  (Optional)  Setup a backup solution
a. Easy solution, get and install Dropbox — instructions on the Dropbox site.  Then update your motion.conf to save to your Dropbox directory:

#/etc/motion/motion.conf
...
target_dir /path/to/dropbox/security_camera
...

b. A more granular solution is to take advantage of hooks configurable in motion.conf. Using these, you can create bash scripts to do anything your heart desires ( like trigger a silent alarm on motion detection outside business hours ). Available hooks: on_event_start, on_event_end, on_picture_save, on_motion_detected, on_movie_start, on_movie_end.
If you have wput installed, you can easily upload files to a remote backup server with these hooks:

#motion.conf
...
on_picture_save wput ftp://user@pass@server %f
...

However, this solution is somewhat less secure, as it uses FTP. In a future post I will detail how to secure this up using encrypted transfer and phrase free keys. ( Stay tuned! )
5. Live feed
This comes working out of the box with Motion. Check out your live stream in your web browser by navigating to: http://localhost:8081
That’s it! Webcam security made easy

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