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I saw something named "Easter Egg" while searching. What is it exactly? How to get them?

Mateo
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ARUN
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4 Answers4

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Since you just said you found it while searching, I'll give a generalized definition. Easter eggs are generally hidden things in either games, websites, programs, or even inside the code of websites or anything. I've never known an easter egg to really gain you anything. Occasionally when playing a game and find an easter egg, you might get an achievement of some kind. But most true easter eggs are very deeply hidden and the reward is mainly from the satisfaction of finding it and being able to show your friends

The old style eggs were mainly a kind of inside jokes between the programmers of games, and people that first played the game and found them rarely knew what they were, but still thought they were funny. Lately most games either don't have easter eggs, or are relatively easy to find and either don't have any inside joke factor at all, or arn't that hard to get after thinking about it for a bit. They still try to be funny with them, but mainly are there for a neat thing for the gamer to find. Easter eggs on websites and in programming code (as far as I know) aren't nearly as prevalent.

Daniel Clem
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A virtual Easter egg is an intentional hidden message, in-joke or feature in a work such as a computer program, web page, video game, movie, book or crossword.

(from Wikipedia)

Sergey
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Easter Eggs in Ubuntu can come from GUI programs, Terminal programs and from any sort of code that a developer wanted to add for fun. The most famous/weird/funny one is the apt-get and aptitude commands.

If you do apt-get moo in the terminal you will see the easter egg.

If you do aptitude moo in the terminal you will see the beginning of a longggg easter egg chain of messages. To see the rest of the messages you need to add the Verbose parameter like this:

aptitude -v moo then each time a new message appears add another v like this:

aptitude -vv moo -> aptitude -vvv moo and so on.. until THE EASTER EGG appears.

Another one is VIM in the terminal. Type :help 42 and will remember a specific movie.

GUI Tools that I have seen having an easter egg are VLC which showed me a cone with a Santa hat on December. When on December don't know.

Another GUI program is firefox. If you type in the url about:robots or about:mozilla you will see some easter eggs. The robot one is funny.

Even unity has several which came from gnome. Press ALT+F2 and type one of the followings:

about:robots
gegls from outer space

In general this are all created by the programmers just for fun. To add a special "Am happy or bored so I made this" feeling.

Luis Alvarado
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An easter egg is a piece of usually humorous code hidden from casual users.

My favorite is: Go to the "run application' dialog and type 'free the fish' Watch the fish.

Will Richardson
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