/etc/motd template

[Dustin Kirkland]

On Thu, Nov 20, 2008 at 10:18 AM, Bryce Harrington <bryce at canonical.com> wrote:
> On Thu, Nov 20, 2008 at 09:49:08AM -0600, Dustin Kirkland wrote:
>>     To access official Ubuntu documentation, please visit:
>>     http://help.ubuntu.com/
>
> Couldn't this be shortened to one line?
>
>      Access official Ubuntu documentation at http://help.ubuntu.com/

I'd agree with that.

> The disclaimer does seem excessive, particularly from the sense of being
> a "Message of the Day", since it will never change.  Displaying it one
> time on first boot, and then just a short reference after would make
> sense?

Agreed, thanks.  I'm looking for some consensus, if there's any more
out there...

>     Your system uses free software; please see ... for terms.
>
> What might be slick would be if this could detect if non-free software
> is installed on the system, and highlight that too.

That would be easy to implement with an update-motd hook, if someone
has a script that detects non-free software.  We'd just need to find
the right package to put that script in, and install a symlink it
into, say, /etc/update-motd/daily.

> Unrelated question - will the motd be able to highlight and warn on
> conditions like low disk space, excessive cpu temps, battery/hardware
> recalls, etc.?

Install landscape-common, and see landscape-sysinfo ...  It collects
some really cool stuff, and puts it into your MOTD.  Mine currently
says:

  System load:  0.26               Swap usage:  0%     Users logged in: 1
  Usage of /:   55.7% of 19.84GB   Temperature: 47 C
  Memory usage: 43%                Processes:   184

  => /local is using 87.4% of 85.50GB

You might open a feature request bug against landscape-client to
highlight warning/error/danger situations somehow.

:-Dustin