xcowsay displays a cute cow and message on your desktop. Inspired by the original cowsay.
xcowsay includes all these amazing features:
- Fully configurable!
- Calculates display time from amount of text
- Dream mode — display images in the bubble
- Can draw thought and speech bubbles
- Daemon mode! Send your cow messages over DBus!
- Three different sized cows provided
- fortune(6) wrapper program: xcowfortune — cow will deliver pearls of wisdom!
- Replace the naffness that is xmessage(1)
- Should work with any window manager
- Supports UTF-8 characters properly
- Use alternative non-cow images if you like.
It works on Macs and *BSD too!
Latest version: xcowsay-1.2.tar.gz
(Previous version xcowsay-1.1.tar.gz.)
xcowsay’s unexpected popularity means it’s now available directly from some Linux distributions and BSDs!
- Mandriva RPMs for i586 and x86_64.
- Fedora packages are here.
- FreeBSD port is here
- NetBSD users can install it via ports too – package here.
- OpenBSD port is here.
- Arch Linux users can get it from AUR.
- Gentoo users can try this ebuild.
- Debian and Ubuntu users should install xcowsay via apt. Note that Ubuntu doesn’t have 1.2 yet.
Big thank you to everyone who’s packaged it for different platforms, made translations, or just commented!
Here’s a screen shot of the new dream mode:
Check out the xcowsay page on Freshmeat.
Posts
Nick,
am trying to ‘roll my own’ from source. THought I could. Is gtk+-2 the same as gtk2? I get an error
no package gtk+-2.0 found
no package gdk-pixbuf-2.0 found
but I have libgdk-pixbuf2 and gtk+2
http://rpm.pbone.net/index.php3/stat/4/idpl/4340451/com/libgtk+2.0_0-2.10.3-5mdv2007.0.i586.rpm.html
Is there a way to .configure it so it will compile? (I might even try a binary if you have one heh, I have Mandriva 2007.0)
Thanks!
August 31, 2008 @ 4:22 am
Have you got the development versions of those packages? I think the package you need is libgtk+2.0_0-devel
http://rpmfind.net//linux/RPM/mandriva/2008.1/i586/media/main/release/libgtk+2.0_0-devel-2.12.9-2mdv2008.1.i586.html
(Although the one above is for 2008.1)
You should be able to install this via urpmi. Good luck!
August 31, 2008 @ 8:38 am
[...] xcowsay [...]
September 1, 2008 @ 4:26 pm
Is it possible to use xcowsay to send messages to other users on the same machine.
We use NX server and have about 10 people on the machine (freenx)
I have noticed the dbus mode – this didn’t seem to do it.
Any ideas if it is possible ?
September 17, 2008 @ 5:07 pm
The problem with the DBus mode at the moment is that xcowsay connects to the user’s session bus, so you can send messages from other programs on the desktop, but you can’t send messages to different user’s session buses (this is a feature of DBus).
This was actually one of the things I wanted to do with the DBus mode originally. A neat solution might be to use the zero-conf XMPP (i.e. iChat) support in Telepathy (http://telepathy.freedesktop.org/wiki/). This would let you send cow-messages to any xcowsay user on the LAN, which would be pretty cool
Since Telepathy is DBus-based it shouldn’t be too much work to extend the existing code to receive messages from this source too. I’ll let you know how I get on!
September 18, 2008 @ 11:20 am
can I have a feature request? I am not familiar with C so I can’t do that on my own.
It would be nice to have an option there, to make a moo sound when displaying cow. is that possible?
I am using xcowsay as email notification, and if I can also hear MOO sound it would be ubercool
November 2, 2008 @ 4:43 pm
[...] http://www.doof.me.uk/xcowsay/ (bkz: inek paketlemek) az sonra oyunalanında [...]
August 20, 2009 @ 7:25 pm
Please, make it easy to make graphical themes for xcowsay…
I would love to have different pictures (like penguin, pig, some real person)
November 17, 2009 @ 3:31 am
Yes, I’m going to add a –image option to xcowsay 1.2 to make things like this easier. See here for a hacky way of doing it in 1.1:
http://www.doof.me.uk/2009/10/31/an-alternative-application-of-xcowsay/
November 17, 2009 @ 8:53 am
How can I change the cow to a duck?
November 18, 2009 @ 8:05 pm
> How can I change the cow to a duck?
I’m going to add a –image option to the next version of xcowsay to
allow you to do things like this.
It’s actually possible to do this in the current version using a hack -
see here:
http://www.doof.me.uk/2009/10/31/an-alternative-application-of-xcowsay/
November 19, 2009 @ 11:21 pm
Issuing:
xcowsay -v
with an .xcowsayrc file in home directory containing:
#
cow_size = small
gives message:
xcowsayrc: line 2: Expected token but found newline
xcowsay 1.1
Copyright (C) 2008 Nick Gasson
….
What token is expected ??
Thanks
November 20, 2009 @ 7:40 pm
Ooops! Looks like the config file doesn’t allow blank lines. Can’t believe that slipped through. I’ll fix it for the next release.
November 20, 2009 @ 8:11 pm
hello Nick!
i have just updated the pkgsrc package:
thank you for the 1.2 release and especially for the –image option.
keep up the good work Nick!
ciao,
Leonardo.
January 16, 2010 @ 8:39 pm
[...] xcowsay foi o notificador que me inspirou para fazer esta postagem. Sério. É muito legal. Veja o exemplo: $ at 17:00 warning: commands will be executed using /bin/sh at> echo "Lembrar de fazer o posto sobre o xcowsay!" | xcowsay -t 40000 at> job 15 at Sat Jan 22 17:00:00 2010 [...]
January 22, 2010 @ 8:36 pm
Cute!
January 27, 2010 @ 1:35 am
I just want to say this program is great! Not only do I use it to pop up messages on my kids’ computers, but I use it for thin client kiosks at our public library (a picture of Melvil Dewey asks them to “Please Wait” every time the browser reloads).
Thank you for this software!
February 12, 2010 @ 5:51 pm