EDIT: 2017-01-08

Igor Rzegocki has a project that uses the same technique outlined here to make some incredible ready-made Street FIghter MotDs – it is really cool, and if you are interested in abusing ansi escape sequences to make MotDs you should check it out :)

Zangief MOtD
Zangief MOtD

Everyone universally agrees that most Message of the Days (MOTDs) are stupid and suck. By the end of reading this post, your mind grapes should be swollen with the knowledge of how to make an MOTD that isn’t stupid and, some would say, doesn’t suck.

Prerequisites

  • Imagemagick
  • OpenJDK
  • coreutils
  • perl
  • git

This should have you covered:

Creating the Util-say file

I use Util-Say to create motd messages. I started out using img2xterm, but I’ve found I get better results with Util-Say.

You can also try ./img2ponysay -2 -- youimg.png > yourimg.txt but I’ve never had good results with that

MOTD-ifying

Mammoth Motd
Mammoth Motd

On CentOS and Debian, I usually just throw the ponysay file directly into /etc/motd and maybe add on some other useful info:

On Ubuntu Boxes (since they use update-motd(1)), I do pretty much the same thing except I just make a bash script in /etc/update-motd.d/25-baller-motd

There are likely better articles on creating a useful MOTD, (here’s one that looks kinda cool) but there are exactly none-better articles on creating MOTDs that are so flossy!