I just started using Mint 12 recently and I'm having a blast so far. I especially like the little fortune cookie messages which appear when you open a new terminal... only I found them to be a little dry. So I decided to replace them with Viz Top Tips. Readers outside of the UK may not know what these are, so here's a little background. Viz is a humourous comic book aimed at adults... if you imagine Dandy or The Beano with swearing, then you're on the right track. For the most part, it's pretty rubbish, but they have a sectionc alled "top tips", where supposed readers' "tips" are printed (the whole section is a satire of the banality prevalent in many similar sections of lifestyle magazines). Sometimes they're ridiculous, sometimes they're scathing political satire, sometimes they're subtly hilarious is ways you don't realise at first. Here's some examples:
'YOUNG mothers. Pretend to be unbelievably dull and unimaginative by meeting other young mothers in public places and only ever talking about your children.'
Phil Telfer, e-mail
'INTERIM governments. Avoid coalition forces overstaying their welcome by yawning loudly and saying you have an early start in the morning.'
Hamid Karzai, e-mail
Obviously they're not really suitable for everybody, so use your own discretion.
So how do you set it up? Well, easy. Download the text file [which I've had to remove due to bizarre forum rules, but pm me and I'll send a copy], and save it in /usr/games/fortunes/ - you'll need to be root, so if you downloaded the file to your home directory you can just run:
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sudo mv ~/viz /usr/share/games/fortunes/viz
then you need to create the database which fortunes will read:
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sudo strfile /usr/share/games/fortunes/viz
You can check to see if everything's working properly by running:
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fortune viz
The next thing to do is modify the mint-fortune script so that it uses the viz database:
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gksudo gedit /usr/bin/mint-fortune
look for the line which calls the "fortune" script - it's line 30 in mine - and change it to add "viz" after the fortune call:
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/usr/games/fortune viz | $command -f $cow
Save the file and you're done! You can test it with:
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mint-fortune
Now you should get a viz top tip every time you open a terminal.
