Make your Debian Linux and FreeBSD terminal / console display daily verse from KJV Bible

Saturday, 26th September 2009

Since I am a Christian and I want to daily be in touch with the Holy Scriptures and I am most of the time spending on my Linux system. I have came to the conclusion that it’s beneficial to
have a daily bible displaying everytime after login in console or terminal in X.

Therefore I thought it might be helpful to somebody out there who would wish to have short sentece of bible on each Linux / FreeBSD machine login.

Here is how to set bible quote to appear everytime after login in Debian Linux:
First install the verse program through:


# apt-get install verse

Next if you want to make the verse display global for the system put :


if [ -f /usr/bin/verse ]; thenecho/usr/bin/verse fi

in /etc/bash.bashrc
On the other hand if you’d like to make it local for your account or a setnumber of accounts on your system append


if [ -f /usr/bin/verse ]; thenecho/usr/bin/verse fi

to your user ~/.bashrc as well as to the home directories of the users you’d like to display a bible verse (if for several users).

If you decide to do that be aware that your login via sftp won’t work anymore – forget about sftp transfers ….

Every time you attempt to login you’ll experience the error message:

“Received message too long”. However that ain’t a real problem for me since I use my system as a desktop and don’t sftp or ssh remotely to my desktop.
In order to prevent this issue where sftp interactivity gets broken it is better to add verse app to execute via /etc/profile i. e. in /etc/profile on top of file add:


if [ -f /usr/bin/verse ]; then echo /usr/bin/verse fi

On FreeBSD the same is achieved a bit differently. Here is how to install it in FreeBSD:

First install fortune program and then install the fortune bible module; In FreeBSD bible quotes are only available via the good old fortune program:

cd /usr/ports/misc/fortune-mod-bible;
make install clean

Next open:the /etc/profile file and insert in the end of it:

echo /usr/games/fortune /usr/local/share/games/fortune/bible

On your next login your FreeBSD should be showing a bible
sentence (quotation) after each and every login.
What is different with Debian’s verse program is that verse keeps displaying one exact quote of the bible during every login for the whole day,
where in FreeBSD the fortune-mod-bible does show a different (random) bible sentence on each and every user login.

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One Response to “Make your Debian Linux and FreeBSD terminal / console display daily verse from KJV Bible”

  1. david webb says:
    Firefox 4.0.1 Firefox 4.0.1 Windows 7 x64 Edition Windows 7 x64 Edition
    Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:2.0.1) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/4.0.1

    i’m trying to get verse to work on terminal, it appears just like it should but it keeps repeating the same verse each time. I noticed in your article you’re using verseNext, current LinuxMint repos don’t have verseNext, just verse. any ideas? I saw a site that talked about verse and conky, but they said the script depended on the package rand, which is also not in the repos.

    sorta stuck here

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