Home ›

Silly Programs

May 19, 2011  By Shawn Powers
 in

Those of us who have been using Linux for a long time all know the joy of silly programs like xeyes. One of my favorites, however, is good old xsnow. Whether you love the cold weather or live in Florida and like to ski on occasion, xsnow will add some winter fun to your desktop. The xsnow program has been around forever and is surely available for your distribution.

If you're absolutely against snow and all its icy accomplices, you might want to check out a couple other oldies but goodies. Back before we had fancy computer games, we used to waste time with programs like xneko (you'll probably find it now as oneko), which was a little cat that chased your "mouse" around the screen. Or, perhaps you still enjoy the ever-staring eyes of xeyes (or a more modern tuxeyes). Finally, if your time-wasting tastes are a bit more on the macabre side, xroach (or groach) might tickle your fancy with bugs that scurry to hide under the windows on your desktop. Whatever your thoughts on silly time-wasting apps, you owe it to yourself to check out a bit of Linux/UNIX history.

______________________

Shawn Powers is an Associate Editor for Linux Journal. You might find him chatting on the IRC channel, or Twitter

Comments

Comment viewing options

Select your preferred way to display the comments and click "Save settings" to activate your changes.

Espeak is very useful thing

Anonymous's picture
Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on Fri, 08/05/2011 - 14:48.

Espeak is very useful thing it converts all my ebooks to wave files and I can later listen to ebooks saving strain on my eyes and electricity wastage on any portable device.

my favourite silly software

rogueclown's picture
Submitted by rogueclown (not verified) on Thu, 06/30/2011 - 14:30.

...and, who can forget the classic sl? mistype ls, get a steam locomotive.

A Doom-like pskill

Desidia's picture
Submitted by Desidia (not verified) on Mon, 06/06/2011 - 07:13.

I remember a patched version of Doom (or maybee Boom, a free fork) that allowed to kill processes from within the game, with your gun...

Never tried it, my box hadn't enough CPU for that... What was the form of a zombie process ?

With the first releases of OpenGL, there was also a 3D-top where the processes were displayed as changing blocks, like in a 3d chart, and it was possible to turn around them, see them from above, and so.

The problem was that the viewer consumed more CPU than all the others...

x-windows silly programs

Saint DanBert's picture
Submitted by Saint DanBert (not verified) on Thu, 06/02/2011 - 18:36.

There was an X-roach like program that was spiders that would cover
an idle tube with cobwebs. Cannot remember the name.

And let's not forget the original "adventure" -- XYZZY

~~~ 0;-Dan

silly programs.

Anonymous's picture
Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on Thu, 05/26/2011 - 14:52.

Does somebody remember XBILL??

I love it.-

MAZES!

snagz's picture
Submitted by snagz (not verified) on Tue, 05/24/2011 - 15:30.

I always loved maze, it would draw endless mazes on your screen and solve them. You can find it integrated into Xscreensaver now.

xscreensaver

seanbutnotheard's picture
Submitted by seanbutnotheard on Tue, 05/24/2011 - 07:59.

The silly programs quickly became one of my favorite things about Linux, not to mention the swaths of goofy and fun old games that are still in most repos. Running Xsnow on a Fluxbox desktop makes me nostalgic about the first Slackware box I built. To this day I install the xscreensaver-extra package on almost every machine I set up, and choose a screensaver that builds some work of computery art before my eyes (like "Vermiculate" or "Squiral").

Xeyes is useful

thisIsMe's picture
Submitted by thisIsMe (not verified) on Mon, 05/23/2011 - 01:57.

xeyes aren't time wasting! If you sit outside on a sunny day, and you can't find your mouse on the screen, xeyes can be very helpful :)

Fortune

JD's picture
Submitted by JD (not verified) on Sun, 05/22/2011 - 10:55.

It's an ancient one, but whenever I set up a Unix box of any stripe, and the fortune (fortune-mod) packages are available, I install 'em and put 'em in my shell startup script.
Logging on can often then be good for a laugh.

Compiling the insults into Sudo is entertaining, too.

Espeak

genus_001's picture
Submitted by genus_001 (not verified) on Sat, 05/21/2011 - 17:25.

espeak reminds me of Joshua in War Games.

noone's mentioned figlet or

Mervaka's picture
Submitted by Mervaka on Sat, 05/21/2011 - 07:43.

noone's mentioned figlet or cowsay? brilliant fun, especially within irssi :)

Roaches

Greg Wildman's picture
Submitted by Greg Wildman (not verified) on Fri, 05/20/2011 - 06:27.

my favourite to use on newbies was xroach. Many a woman screamed when they minimized a window.

Others:

xmag - magnifier
xbiff - mail notification
xclock - analog clock

Do I have any chance to run

Tomka's picture
Submitted by Tomka (not verified) on Fri, 05/20/2011 - 11:07.

Do I have any chance to run xroach or groach on Ubuntu? I cannot find it

blast

xtifr's picture
Submitted by xtifr on Fri, 05/20/2011 - 05:34.

One of my favorites, good for letting off steam, is the ancient X11 demo program, blast, which lets you create (semi-) persistent holes in your windows. Feeling frustrated with your word processor or browser? Blast the thing full of holes!

The upstream source site seems to be dead, but it should still be available in several distros' repositories. (I was going to link to the Debian package page, which includes the unmodified source, but my attempt to do so seemed to make the system think I was spamming, so, "apt-get install blast" if you run Debian, and you're on your own otherwise.)

check Xpenguins

Anonymous's picture
Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on Thu, 05/19/2011 - 20:26.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XPenguins

I remember installing

Anonymous's picture
Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on Fri, 05/20/2011 - 11:47.

I remember installing ArchLinux (I think) a few years ago, and Xpengiuns was active on the greeter. It doesn't work so well once I'm logged in though, because my windows fill the whole screen.

Help! I didn't know

xrat's picture
Submitted by xrat (not verified) on Thu, 05/19/2011 - 11:57.

... about these gOOdies :)
But I do know another:
Ubuntu users might want to try Alt-F2 and then "free the fish" :)

Do I have a chance, to stop

Anonymous's picture
Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on Fri, 05/20/2011 - 02:27.

Do I have a chance, to stop the fish, and if so, how.

kill the gnome-panel

sid's picture
Submitted by sid (not verified) on Mon, 05/23/2011 - 00:21.

kill the gnome-panel

Pulling the plug generally

xrat's picture
Submitted by xrat (not verified) on Fri, 05/20/2011 - 07:13.

Pulling the plug generally helps getting rid of fish(es) ;-)

Works also in Fedora.

init 5's picture
Submitted by init 5 (not verified) on Fri, 05/20/2011 - 01:15.

Works also in Fedora.

Fish

Anonymous's picture
Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on Fri, 05/20/2011 - 01:22.

And how can I catch the fish?

click on it

Anonymous's picture
Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on Sat, 05/21/2011 - 12:08.

Just click on the fish (scares the fish), but it will come back again...

to stop the annoying fish,

Anonymous's picture
Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on Fri, 05/20/2011 - 20:40.

to stop the annoying fish, $killall gnome-panel

Webcast
More Resources
How to Build an Optimal Hadoop Cluster to Store and Maintain Unlimited Amounts of Data Using Microservers

Realizing the promise of Apache® Hadoop® requires the effective deployment of compute, memory, storage and networking to achieve optimal results. With its flexibility and multitude of options, it is easy to over or under provision the server infrastructure, resulting in poor performance and high TCO. Join us for an in depth, technical discussion with industry experts from leading Hadoop and server companies who will provide insights into the key considerations for designing and deploying an optimal Hadoop cluster.

Learn More

Sponsored by AMD

White Paper
More Resources
Red Hat White Paper: Using an Open Source Framework to Catch the Bad Guy

Built-in forensics, incident response, and security with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6

Every security policy provides guidance and requirements for ensuring adequate protection of information and data, as well as high-level technical and administrative security requirements for a system in a given environment. Traditionally, providing security for a system focuses on the confidentiality of the information on it. However, protecting the data integrity and system and data availability is just as important. For example, when processing United States intelligence information, there are three attributes that require protection: confidentiality, integrity, and availability.

Learn more about catching the bad guy in this free white paper.

Learn More

Sponsored by DLT Solutions