In the category of “silly tricks that you can do at the console that don’t really make any progress but are kind of fun anyway,” here are two things you might not normally combine: the fortune package inherited from the Unix of Long Ago, and the espeak tool.
You can probably see where I’m going with this. Technically this is the bare minimum of what’s needed. Type:
fortune | espeak
Chant “Speak to us, oh great and mighty computer,” press return, and your computer will sing to you with the wisdom of the ancients — or the perversity of a stand-up comic, if you enable the off-color fortunes. Remember if you don’t like the default voice you can change that as well, and espeak supports a lot of different language types.
Now you can’t say your computer never talks to you any more. 🙂
Motho ke motho ka botho 
The Monty Python’s mod with a British accent from espeak is priceless!
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the pronunciation is not very clear … i mean i tried the sample over at this page http://espeak.sourceforge.net/samples.html but it was not clear at all
Agreed that’s not easy to listen to. “The Raven”, or ‘fortune’ for that matter, might be pushing it a bit but espeak is very handy for getting some feedback from a script without having to keep your eyes glued to a terminal window.
This is fun too:
‘tail -f -n 1 /var/log/messages | espeak’
…for a short time. 🙂
fortune | espeak .
‘tail -f -n 1 /var/log/messages | espeak’
How do i use both command?
Thank you! Made my day 😉 (and given that it’s election day in the UK, I needed this…)