So, you’ve set up SSH as per my quick tutorial, but here’s a nice, easy and quick tip to display a message to all users when they login.

You can put anything really - remind them to follow your guidelines, warn them that they shouldn’t do anything nasty, some nice ASCII art perhaps - or just display a welcome message.

You need to place your message in the file /etc/motd (that’s message of the day, not Match of the Day). You’ll need root privileges (aka super-administrator) to edit this file, so launch a terminal and do:

I’ve used the vim editor here, but substitute in your favourite text editor (a couple of graphical ones are gedit for Gnome and kwrite for KDE). Ubuntu users - skip the su - bit and prefix the last command with the word sudo.

Just place your message in that file, save it and then all your remote logins (and local text-based ones too) will get shown that message.

Easy, quick and nice.

If you think you have what it takes to write the posts here at FOSSwire - why not send your posts in to us?

We’re looking for basically anything FOSSwire-worthy, so it could be a tutorial, a tips/tricks post, an article or a review or basically anything! If you want your post to appear here on FOSSwire, get writing and when you’re ready to submit them, send them in to this email address with the subject line ‘FOSSwire Post’.

peter <A|+> gizbuzz \D0|/ co \d1t/ uk

The best posts will get featured here on FOSSwire (you get full credit and a link to your site or blog of course!) and if you’re really good then we might ask you to write some more.

Get blogging!

Here’s a nice, easy, quick tip for anyone on Linux (in fact - many other systems based on Unix share this too!).

If you want to see what programs are using your CPU power and RAM at any one time, you can use an awesome program called top.

top is a program you run from the terminal (don’t be scared!), so launch a terminal or console program (usually under accessories, system or utilities in your applications list) and type in top and press Enter.

This will show you a list of as many of the currently running programs on your system that will fit, ordered by how much CPU they’re using. The display will update every few seconds, so you can watch your computer sweat as it performs some CPU-eating calculations.

Hit q at any time to quit top.

Your graphical environment might also have similar graphical tools - look for the KDE System Guard, the Gnome System Monitor or similar on Linux to have a graphical app do this for you.

Now you can check on your computer’s status from anywhere.