Last Updated on May 25, 2022
Who loves eye candy? Don’t be shy — you can raise both hands!!
Linux Candy is a series of articles covering interesting eye candy software. We’re only featuring open-source software in this series.
If you spend all day embroiled in data science, learning a new programming language, sit in countless meetings wishing you were anywhere else, you’ll need some light relief at the end of the day. And what better way by making your desktop environment a bit more fun.
You might have heard of cowsay, software that generates ASCII pictures of a cow with a message. cowsay isn’t limited to cow depictions, it also shows other animals, including Tux the Penguin.
For this article, we’re looking at a different take on cowsay. It goes by the name xcowsay. This program displays a cute graphical cow and speech bubble. The program was first started over 12 years ago, but it’s still under active development, with a new release published only last week.
Installation
I won’t dwell any longer than necessary on installation. If there’s not a package for xcowsay in your distro, just clone the project’s repository, and compile the source code with the following commands:
$ cd xcowsay/
$ ./autogen.sh
$ ./configure
$ make -j4
$ sudo make install
(the -j flag for the make command enables the compiler to use more cores, which speeds up compilation).
Next page: Page 2 – In Operation
Pages in this article:
Page 1 – Introduction / Installation
Page 2 – In Operation
Page 3 – Summary
Followed your instructions to the T and not really sure if this is working or not ? How will I know? Can I run something to invoke it? On Arch Linux.
That’s an exercise for the reader.