How to get aquarium on Lubuntu console

Do you ever get bored with your console/terminal? have you ever think about getting an aquarium on your terminal/console window (with some fish on it)? if you like that idea, follow this easy tutorial on how to get aquarium on lubuntu console/terminal.

Some of you might already know, but some may be not, to get an aquarium on our lubuntu console/terminal, we are going to run a program called asciiquarium (ascii aquarium), asciiquarium is console/text based animation program.

Unfortunately we cannot use apt-get command to install asciiquarium, we need to download manually the binary and compile the required perl library, but don't worry it's not that hard to do, just follow my instructions you'll be fine.

Step by step how to install aquarium (asciiquarium) on lubuntu

• install libcurses-perl package



sudo apt-get install libcurses-perl



• download Term Animation 2.4 source code (we need to compile this library because it's needed to run asciiquarium)



wget http://search.cpan.org/CPAN/authors/id/K/KB/KBAUCOM/Term-Animation-2.4.tar.gz




tar -zxvf Term-Animation-2.4.tar.gz



• compile Term Animation 2.4



cd Term-Animation-2.4/




perl Makefile.PL && make && make test




sudo make install


NOTE: if the 'make' command is not recognize, you need to install first


sudo apt-get install make



• download asciiquarium binary



wget http://www.robobunny.com/projects/asciiquarium/asciiquarium.tar.gz




tar -zxvf asciiquarium.tar.gz



• give permission to the asciiquarium binary

NOTE: assume that the directory of asciiquarium is called asciiquarium_1.1

cd asciiquarium_1.1




chmod +x asciiquarium



• copy the binary to /usr/local/bin so that can asciiquarium can be run from anywhere



sudo cp asciiquarium /usr/local/bin/



• run asciiquarium see if it's work



asciiquarium

Congratulation now you have your own personal aquarium inside your lubuntu console/terminal, pretty cool huh? go ahead show to your parents and make them proud.

How to have more fun

You can go to fullscreen mode and run asciiquarium so that you can have fullscreen aquarium, simply press CTRL + ALT + F1 (or choose from F2 to F6), login with your username and password, run asciiquarium, to exit fullscreen press CTRL + ALT + F7.

~ have fun ~