Ubuntu: Up and Running

Ubuntu Easter Eggs

Although not strictly in the games category, it’s fun to see what the Ubuntu developers have been up to in their spare time—for example, hiding commands in the operating system, which are commonly known as Easter eggs.

The Ubuntu Fish

If you press Alt-F2 and enter the following in response to the prompt that’s displayed, you’ll release a fish (see Figure 13-13) onto your desktop that will swim around, leaving and entering the screen at random intervals:

free the fish

Figure 13-13. Wanda the fish

When you click Wanda, she will change direction and rapidly swim away. When you’ve had enough of the little creature, you can banish her by pressing Alt-F2 and entering the following command to restart Gnome’s panels:

killall gnome-panel

This Easter egg will run only in Gnome, not KDE or Xfce.