Creating fancy server message with figlet

Every time you log in to the server you can see a message that is shown on the terminal. The message comes from the file /etc/motd (message of the day). If you want the users to notice your message, you can make it a little bit fancy :) You can use figlet to do that. Figlet can create multiple types of ascii text messages in nice font. More about this tool is available on http://www.figlet.org/

To install figlet type in command prompt: sudo apt-get install figlet

Now, to create Fancy server name text and center it horizontally (as image shows), use this command:
$ figlet -f block -c "Fancy server name" > /etc/motd

You can use more types of fonts specified with -f option, but only one at a time. To list a directory with available figlet fonts use:
$ figlet -I2

Remove external media with Ejecter

Ejecter is an utility to safely, easily remove external media. A simple menu that sits in the system notification area, providing you a quick way to unmount external peripherals such as usb pendrives, cd/dvd, external hard disks and so.

To install ejecter on ubuntu type in console: sudo apt-get install ejecter
To check more info about ejecter go to homepage: https://launchpad.net/ejecter

Red notebook personal diary and journal

RedNotebook is a graphical diary and journal helping you keep track of notes and thoughts. It includes a calendar navigation, customizable templates, export functionality and word clouds. You can also format, tag and search your entries.

To install it type in console: sudo apt-get install rednotebook

Red notebook includes theese features (author promissed more functions later) :

• Enter text for individual days and navigate using a fancy calendar
• Add Categories to days and fill them with content
• Tag your entries
• Format your text bold, italic or underlined
• Insert Images, files and links to websites
• Links and mail addresses are recognized automatically
• (Live) Search
• Automatic saving
• Backup to zip archive
• Word Clouds with most often used words and tags
• Templates for each weekday and arbitrarily named ones
• Export the journal to HTML, Latex or plain text
• Graphical preferences dialog
• You can have multiple journals
• RedNotebook is open source software, you are free to use and redistribute it under the terms of the GPL
• The data is stored in plain text files, no database is needed

Check the homepage at http://digitaldump.wordpress.com/projects/rednotebook/

Monitor your boot with bootchart

Bootchart is a tool for performance analysis and visualization of the GNU/Linux boot process. Resource utilization and process information are collected during the boot process and are later rendered in a PNG, SVG or EPS encoded chart.

To install botchart type in console: sudo apt-get install bootchart

Bootchart collects various statistics from /proc utilising a shell script which collects the info. After the next boot you will find detailed performance chart created by java application showing your boot in /var/log/bootchart directory and also a tarball containing logs.

The only thing I don't like about bootchart is, that after some time you will find a lot of logs and images in the bootchart folder while there is no script to delet them after some time. We can fix this by creating a cron job:

At first use your favourite editor to edit crontab:

To edit crontab with nano:
sudo crontab -e

To edit crontab with vi:
export EDITOR=vi; sudo crontab -e

Add this line to root crontab if you want to delete files older than 30 days:
@reboot /usr/bin/find /var/log/bootchart -type f -mtime +30 -exec rm {} \;
To find out more about bootchart - check the bootchart web at http://www.bootchart.org/