[SW] Two CLI screensavers

Actually, I do not use screensavers. I always turn off the monitor when I have to leave my PC for a while. As a CLI fan, however, I am willing to see a CLI screensaver running on my monitor, especially when the screensaver is cool.

Cmatrix is a cool screensaver and it's easy for Ubuntu users to install. Just use the command

$ sudo apt-get install cmatrix

to get it, and you can have a really Matrix-like screensaver. Looks really cool, doesn't it?


The second one I installed is ASCIIQuarium. I found it on the Mostly CLI blog (Is that a Fish in Your CLI? The asciiquarium Screensaver.), which is worth visiting if you are also a CLI fan. Followed the steps, I download the Term::Animation module but got a warning when I runned the ``perl Makefile.PL'' command. The warning message was

Warning: prerequisite Curses 1.06 not found.

Then I tried to find out how to installed the so called ``curses'' in my Ubuntu 8.04, even install the libncurses5-dev (it's not the right one), but got no luky. Then, I noticed that all the packages are related to Perl! I am not familiar with Perl so I had no clear idea what searching strategy was right. Finally I knew that the libcurses-perl is the key. So if you encounter the same problem I had, please use the following command to install the libcurses-perl package.

$ sudo apt-get install libcurses-perl

Then here comes the ASCII fishes (as well as other things...).