You have to touch .hushlogin. [04:43:35 shaul]$ man login
LOGIN(1) LOGIN(1) NAME login - Begin session on the system SYNOPSIS login [username [environmental-variables]] DESCRIPTION login is used to establish a new session with the system. . . . for more information. After a successful login, you will be informed of any sys tem messages and the presence of mail. You may turn off the printing of the system message file, /etc/motd, by creating a zero-length file .hushlogin in your login directory. The mail message will be one of "You have new > This certainly isn't a serious problem, but I've been a little perplexed > at not being able to get rid of the little blurb about Debian/GNU > software not being responsible for your machine blowing up, blah, blah, > blah that appears directly after login. Any ideas would be greatly > appreciated. >