Custom text/logo on login shell

Anand Bhaskaran
2 min readApr 9, 2019

--

Customization is the key to the modern world. This tutorial describes a simple step by step tutorial a for a custom Linux login message screen that appears during every new SSH session.

Standards

Any message on the login screen should comprise of ASCII characters. You can even type down any message that you would like to show to the users. Following is the standard default text that will be displayed for a Vanilla Linux user.

The programs included with the Debian GNU/Linux system are free software;
the exact distribution terms for each program are described in the
individual files in /usr/share/doc/*/copyright.
Debian GNU/Linux comes with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY, to the extent
permitted by applicable law.

1. Preparation

Let’s prepare the logo that we would like to display. There are various online free tools that can transform the logo file into an ASCII text. Here are a few online tools I find handy for this transformation

If you are doing for fun you can have images like R2D2 as your login logo.

However, in this tutorial, I will use the ASCII image of our company logo but you can try the same with your own text/logo/image of your preference.

Now, I have transformed our logo into the asci texts and prepared it in the text file as below.

2. Setup

In this step, we are going to modify the default display message to have our new logo.

  1. Login/SSH into the machine where you would like to apply this change.
  2. Type the command sudo nano /etc/motd
  3. Modify the file and append the ASCII logo to it as shown below.

4. Save the file

3. Test

Now ssh or log in to the machine again and you will see the customized message as below.

Thank you for reading!

--

--