With this little ascii animation you can enjoy an animated pseudo-screensaver even on your GUI-less server. It won’t boost your productivity, it won’t make you a better programmer or your web site run faster. But it could bring you a bit of “security through obfuscation” from those who want to try to log onto your physical GUI-less workstation. Let’s see how to install and use this little under water wonder.

Installation

This little gem can be install on nearly any Linux distribution. As long as you have Perl installed, you should be able to get this up and running in no time. Here are the steps you need to follow. I will assume you might want to test this on a normal GUI-fied version of Linux before you try it on your GUI-less server. So, let’s install.

The first portion of the installation will take care of any remaining dependencies that aren’t included in the standard Perl installation. For this installation, follow these steps:

1. Open up a terminal windows. If you are using a GUI-less server then just log in.
2. Change to the /tmp directory with the command cd /tmp.
3. Download the Terminal Animation package with the command wget http://search.cpan.org/CPAN/authors/id/K/KB/KBAUCOM/Term-Animation-2.4.tar.gz.
4. Unpack the Terminal Animation package with the command tar -zxvf Term-Animation-2.4.tar.gz.
5. Change into the newly created directory with the command cd Term-Animation-2.4/.
6. Build the makefile with the command perl Makefile.PL && make && make test.
7. Compile Terminal Animation with the command sudo make install

Now to install the actually asciiquarium application. Follow these steps.

1. Open a terminal window (again, if you are using a GUI-less server, just log in).
2. Change to the /tmp directory with the command cd /tmp.
3. Download the necessary package with the command wget http://www.robobunny.com/projects/asciiquarium/asciiquarium.tar.gz.
4. Unpack the asciiquarium package with the command tar -zxvf asciiquarium.tar.gz.
5. Change into the newly created directory with the command cd asciiquarium.
6. Copy the executable to the necessary directory with the command sudo cp asciiquarium /usr/local/bin.
7. Give the executable the proper permissions with the command sudo chmod 0755 /usr/loca/bin/asciiquarium.

Figure 1

It is time to test out the waters of asciiquarium. To do so open up your terminal window (or if using a GUI-less machine – log in) and issue the command /usr/local/bin/asciiquarium. When it runs it will look something similar to Figure 1 (but in animated form).

Now, you may be asking yourself how could this serve as a form of security? Simple. Even with a standard desktop distribution you can log into a virtual terminal (Ctrl-Alt-F2 – for instance), log in, and run the application. Your full screen will be filled with the asciiquarium and unless a user knows to either hit Ctrl-c or move back to your original virtual terminal, they won’t have the slightest idea what to do.

Nothing is worse than posting ascii art that the others already know and to avoid this dilemma users could turn to applications that can turn images into ascii art to create unique images.

Shot2Char is just one of the many applications that can do that. Only one image can be converted at a time and it has to be available in one of the supported image formats like jpg, gif or bmp.

The user can change some settings that define the outcome, for instance the font and font size or if the original colors should be kept or if the image should be converted to an black and white image. The chars that are used to create the image can be defined in that menu as well. The output format can also be selected. It can either be an image, html or text file.

I´am not sure about the technique used to show this impressive ascii movies, if you know let me know please. But know, take a look for yourself and enjoy this fine piece of technology. Everything is available at romanm.ch.