Command Line Archives • Linux Tips

Update Flatpaks From The Terminal

Today’s article is just going to be nice and quick. It is just going to be about how you can update flatpaks from the terminal. This might be something you’re interested in learning. So, if you want to know how to update flatpaks from the terminal, this is the article for you!

Trust me, this shouldn’t take too long. That’s good because I’m not sure how long I have! I’m having some desktop computer issues. I have laptops, yes plural, available, but I hate typing on them. I could just hook up an external monitor and keyboard, but that’s a lot like work. If I was interested in doing work, I’d investigate why my desktop PCs keep dying.

What Is A Flatpak:

A flatpak is an application package format. To enable flatpaks, you’ll have to install some software first. That seems like a good article that hasn’t been written yet.

Anyhow, a flatpak comes with all the dependencies it needs to run. It is also run in a sandbox, meaning it is more secure as it runs independently of the operating system and other applications. As they run independently, they’re able to be installed (in theory) on any distro. You don’t need to make a flatpak for each distro’s package manager, you can just make the one flatpak and it should work everywhere.

If you have something like the Gnome Software Manager and you’ve installed the initial flatpak software (software that enables you to use these packages in the first place) then you’ll see that it integrates flatpaks into the system. In that case, flatpaks will update with the rest of the system and you don’t need to worry about updating flatpaks in the terminal.

On the other hand, this may not be true for you and you may not realize that you can update flatpaks from the terminal. Which means this is for you…

Update Flatpaks From The Terminal:

Of course, this means you need an open terminal. Just press CTRL + ALT + T and your default terminal should open. You may need to open the terminal from your application menu, but the above key bindings are fairly universal.

The command is really simple if you want to update flatpaks from the terminal. To do so, you simply run this command:

flatpak update

1	flatpak update

Notice that you do not need sudo or any elevated permissions. Many folks list this command as a sudo prefaced command and that’s not necessary. The flatpaks installed are installed in a way that the files belong to the user. As such, there’s no need to use elevated permissions.

While you’re there, there’s a lot that one might not know about the flatpak application. I highly suggest you check out the man page to learn more – as there’s quite a bit that you can do with the application.

man flatpak

1	man flatpak

Yeah, that should show you all the options you have. There are far too many options to cover in this short article about updating flatpaks from the terminal.

Closure:

So, yeah… I told you that this would be a nice and short article. There’s a way to update flatpaks from the terminal and this is how you do it. You might as well know how to do so. It’s not complicated and might come in handy someday, especially if you’re expected to update them manually.

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Let’s Mount An .iso In Lubuntu

Today we’re going to discuss something you won’t need to do often, as we learn about how to mount an .iso in Lubuntu. That seems like a fun article to write and it’s something I just had to do. So, that seemed like a good idea to me.

This shouldn’t be a very long article. I’ll try to keep it simple and straight forward. I figure if you can follow simple directions, you’ve got this licked. It’s not exactly a challenging task. Anyone willing to try hard enough can manage to follow along with this article.

I suppose we should start at the beginning…

What Is An .iso file?

An .iso file is a standard that’s used for images of optical disks. If you’ve used CD/DVD burning applications, it’s what you’re doing when you ‘burn an image’, for example. It’s a single file, meant to be written as an image, and is a file that’s meant to be an optical disk.

You’ll run into .iso files in Linux often. Pretty much every single distro out there is released in .iso format. We don’t always use them for optical disks. You’ll find that a lot of hardware doesn’t even have an optical disk drive. As such, we use the image formats for other things – like USB drives.

We burn these .iso files to a USB so that we can install Linux in the first place. When you’re faced with installing Linux and want (or need) to do it with a USB thumb drive, you’ll want to use tools like balenaEtcher.

So, with Linux at least, you’re likely to run into .iso files. They’re a useful way of sharing a disk image. You’d originally write that disk image to a disk (like optical media) as a single file and then that disk would work. If you try to write an .iso to media as just a file, it’s not going to work as something you can boot from.

You can learn more about the .iso format at Wikipedia. There are other formats for disk images, just so you’re aware. Read the Wikipedia article for more information.

The Mount Command:

We’ll be using the terminal for this command and we’ll be using the mount command for this exercise. As we’re only addressing Lubuntu (though this will certainly work in other distros) we know that the command is already installed and there’s no work for you to do there.

If you check the man page, you’ll see that the mount command is exactly what we need. The man page describes it like this:

mount – mount a filesystem

See? Exactly what we need to mount an .iso in Lubuntu! It’s perfect for the purpose.

You probably mount things all the time. If a disk is usable in Linux, it has been mounted. (You may run checks against an unmounted disk, of course.) If you plug in a USB drive, Lubuntu will happily (assuming your settings are the default settings) mount the drive for you. It’s a handy thing, to have the system smart enough to mount devices when plugged in. It beats the old way of having to mount them yourself manually.

So, the mount application is already installed and you needn’t install anything, but we will be doing this in the terminal. Yes, you can probably manage to do this with some GUI trickery, but you might as well learn how to mount that .iso file in the terminal. It’ll be good for you!

Mount An .iso In Lubuntu:

As mentioned above, we’ll be doing this in the terminal, the way it has historically been done. This isn’t going to be all that challenging, but you first need to open the terminal. To open your terminal, just press CTRL + ALT + T. That should open your terminal.

With your terminal now open, you need a .iso file for this so feel free to download a distro (such as Lubuntu) to your Downloads directory – or wherever you want it to be. You start the mounting procedure by first setting a location for the file to be mounted. Like so:

sudo mkdir /media/<name>

1	sudo mkdir /media/<name>

In theory, you can probably make the directory anywhere, but we will be dealing with convention. If you’re using Lubuntu, things should be mounted as media, and so they go in that directory.

The next step is the actual mounting of the file. This isn’t difficult, you just need to know the path of the .iso and where you just made the directory. That command would look similar to this:

sudo mount /path/to/<iso_file>.iso /media/<name> -o loop

1	sudo mount /path/to/<iso_file>.iso /media/<name> -o loop

At this point, your .iso file is mounted. You can use the file manager (PCManFM-Qt) to navigate to the files included in the .iso file. You can also list the contents of that file with this command:

ls -l /media/<name>

1	ls -l /media/<name>

With the .iso mounted, you can browse, copy, and extract files from the .iso file. You could theoretically add files to the image, but that’s not always a wise decision.

When you’re done with the mounted .iso, you can just unmount it with the following terminal command:

sudo umount /media/<name>

1	sudo umount /media/<name>

This is all you really need to know to mount an .iso in Lubuntu. Try it for yourself, you can’t really break anything.

Closure:

Well, if you ever need to mount an .iso in Lubuntu, you now know how to do so. As I told you near the start, it’s not that complicated. If you just think it through and follow directions, you’ll be all set. It’s not all that often that you need to mount an .iso, but the situation does happen. This is especially true if you’ve done a backup that was a disk image and you need to recover files from it because you’ve had something break.

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Extract Multi-Part rar Files In Ubuntu

Today’s article is limited to just a subset of users as there aren’t that many people who want to extract multi-part rar files in Ubuntu. This isn’t something you’re going to face often (unless you’re still pirating stuff from Usenet) but it’s something some folks will face. So, this article is for all of those people, all three of you!

I suppose we first need to talk about WinRAR. For those that do not know, WinRAR is a proprietary company that uses a proprietary compression method. Even though it’s proprietary, it has some pretty great features. You have to give credit where credit is due. There are multiple versions of compression used over the years but they all share the same .rar file extension and are all reasonably compatible with one another.

The GUI version of WinRAR is a Windows-only trialware application but there’s a command-line version that can be installed in most distros. While this article is Ubuntu-specific, it’s sure to work with other distros though the installation method may be different. On top of that, many Linux tools (such as file-roller) are capable of extracting files compressed with WinRAR.

This isn’t going to be a very complicated article. It also shouldn’t be all that difficult. I figure folks can follow along if they need to when they need to. This isn’t something the average Linux user is going to face daily. After all, the majority of our software is free! There’s no reason to pirate it! (Seriously, I’m sure there are legitimate uses for multi-part rar files but I’ve only really seen them in frequent use with software piracy.)

Install unrar In Ubuntu:

To extract these multi-part rar files in Ubuntu, you’ll want to install the unrar application. That makes sense, after all. So, like so many things, we’re going to do this in the terminal. You can certainly install unrar with the GUI software installation tools, but we might as well do so in the terminal.

With that in mind, and with this unrar process also being in the terminal, we might as well go ahead and get unrar installed in Ubuntu. First, you can press CTRL + ALT + T to open your terminal. You should also be aware that this is going to pretty much work with any Debian (or Ubuntu) derivative out there. So, this works just as well with Mint, ElementaryOS, or the like…

I suppose we should update first, and you can do that easily enough:

sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade

1	sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade

If you trust your upgrades and don’t want to have to manually approve them, then you can just add the -y flag to the end of that, like so:

sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade -y

1	sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade -y

The next step is going to be installing unrar. You do so like this:

sudo apt install unrar

1	sudo apt install unrar

At this point, you can check the man page (man unrar) where you’ll learn that the unrar application describes itself like so:

unrar – extract files from rar archives

That’s a good description and, as you can see, is exactly the tool we want for this operation. If you’re going to extract multi-part rar files in Ubuntu, this is a good tool to do it with. (You can just as easily find a GUI application that will take care of this.)

Extract Multi-Part rar Files In Ubuntu:

I hope you left your terminal open after the installation phase. If not, you’re going to need to open it again. I envision people searching for this specific process and following along. I don’t envision people doing this just for the sake of following along. After all, it’s not like I made multiple-part rar files for you to test this with. You’ll want this article when you need this article.

Anyhow, the process is quite simple.

First, move all of the files into a single directory. This is going to make it much easier. In theory, you could specify the individual paths, but we’re not going to be doing that. No, move all the multiple parts to a single directory. Trust me on this one.

The syntax you’re going to use will be as follows:

unrar x /path/to/file.rar

1	unrar x /path/to/file.rar

No, you do not include all the other parts. You only need to unrar the first file and the unrar tool will realize that it’s multiple parts and extract them sequentially. It will even tell you that it’s doing so, as it writes that data to the standard output.

This is why you move all the files to their own directory. Again, you only need to tell unrar to extract the very first of the files. It’ll happily find and extract the rest. Of course, you need ownership of the files or you’ll need elevated permissions (such as sudo) to extract the files.

Closure:

So, if you ever need to extract multi-part rar files in Ubuntu, you now know there’s an article that covers this. I don’t expect all that many people to need this information. I do anticipate those who need this information will be able to find this site (or another, I suppose) through a search engine. This isn’t something you’re likely to need every day, even though it’s relatively simple.

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A Bit About The Finger Command:

Today’s article is not going to be all that difficult to follow as the subject is just helping us learn a bit about the finger command. This probably isn’t useful for many of my readers, but it may be useful for those running full multi-user systems. So, let’s talk about the finger command.

The finger command is a bit weird. It’s an application you can call from the terminal and a protocol. It’s a tool used to get user information. It was more widely used back when things like a user’s real name and email address weren’t considered private information. In fact, finger has been used to compromise systems in the past.

Now, for the average reader, this isn’t a major concern. The average reader probably doesn’t need to know anything about finger.

See, the finger application gives you information about a user.

That doesn’t seem like much for my average reader but it’s possible to store a lot more information than just a username. On a multi-user system, you can store more than just a username. You can store fields like their email address, their workstation, their office address, their phone number, and many other fields.

As you can guess, that’s now considered sensitive information. A lot has changed since the early 70s, which is when the finger program was written, and then in the mid-70s when name/finger was proposed as a useful way to see if a person is online (logged into the system) and may be available for a meeting.

But, finger is still useful today. You’re not storing all that information anyhow. There are far better tools in an office environment these days.

Install finger:

If you install the finger application, you can check the man page to learn that finger identifies itself as this:

finger — user information lookup program

Which is what you can use it for today, especially for those of you who have more than one user on your system. You’re not storing things like email addresses in any of these fields, not as a regular desktop user. So, you can certainly install this (though there are other ways to see who is logged in or whatnot).

So, if you want to install finger, you’ll need an open terminal. To do that, you can usually just press CTRL + ALT + T. That should do the trick, otherwise, you’ll have to open the terminal manually.

With the terminal open, you’ll find finger is easily installed from your default repositories. Some examples follow:

Debian/Ubuntu/etc:

sudo apt install finger

1	sudo apt install finger

Fedora/derivatives:

sudo dnf install finger

1	sudo dnf install finger

RHEL/CentOS/derivatives:

sudo yum install finger

1	sudo yum install finger

See? It’s nice and easy to install finger. It’s likely in your default repos on other systems, so try that first before hunting it down to compile it on your own.

The Finger Command:

If you followed the above directions, you installed finger with the terminal. That’s good because you need an open terminal for this. So, you should still have an open terminal. If not, you’ll need to open one, of course…

Now, the syntax is simple:

finger <user_name>

1	finger <user_name>

The output from this command would look similar to this:

output from the finger command — See? Some useful information about the user from the finger command.

There are many options, but that’s the most useful and the one with the information you’re likely after. However, you should read the man page for this one. It’s a beauty.

For example, you can tell finger to not show anything by having a ~/.nofinger file in your home directory. You can even include your PGP key by adding a ~/.pgpkey (containing said key) if you want. As you can see, this is very much aimed at a multi-user system.

Probably the most useful of the flags is the -m flag. If used properly, it will avoid finding real names. This is useful when you want to find just the username and not match it with any real names. Usernames are unique, while real names might not be. The syntax would be:

finger -m <user_name>

1	finger -m <user_name>

Other than that, it’s a fun command to play around with. It does output some useful user information, so it’s not useless on your regular desktop system – especially if you have multiple users (and you do, technically).

Closure:

So, there’s another one for the books. Another article is done and published. This time around, we discussed the finger command. I’m not sure how many folks will find it useful, but it’s worth sharing the information. Eventually, someone will find it useful.

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Monitor Bandwidth In Real Time

Today we’re going to have a fun article, an easy enough article, where we simply talk about one way to monitor bandwidth in real time. This is not something you’re normally going to do unless you’re in an unusual situation. It’s still something fun and easy, so why not cover it?

This might be useful if you want to monitor bandwidth at an edge system. Let’s say you have a public-facing server and you’re not behind a router that gives you this information in a fancy widget or whatnot and you want to monitor the bandwidth in real time. Well, you can do that. In fact, there are all sorts of tools that will let you do this. Heck, I think I may have even shared some of this type of stuff in the past.

Maybe take a gander at some of the following articles:

Monitor Bandwidth With nload
‘vnStat’ A Tool For Monitoring Your Bandwidth Usage
Visualize Your Network Traffic With ‘darkstat’

(There are more, just search the site for ‘bandwidth’ – which is how I came up with those links. I wasn’t picky, I just picked the first few that looked like they might interest people and be similar to this one.)

As I mentioned, it’s easy to monitor your bandwidth. It’s easy to monitor your bandwidth in real time. There are countless options and applications for this, so today we’re just going to cover one more option from the myriad options available to you as a Linux user.

Today’s article will be about ‘cbm’… Trust me, it’s easy. It’s very easy!

What Is This cbm?

Well, cbm stands for Color Bandwidth Monitor and it’s not a new application. In fact, the GitHub page indicates that it hasn’t been updated in a while. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, as it could mean that it’s just feature complete and in need of nothing.

I’ve only checked on Ubuntu (technically Lubuntu) and Mint, but cbm is in the default repositories. I’m a bit of a slacker, so I haven’t checked elsewhere, but it’s probably in their default repositories too. It’s just a tiny application with a very specific purpose. Those are the kinds of apps that make it into default repositories.

If you check the man page, you’ll see that cbm defines itself simply as:

cbm – display in real time the network traffic speed

Supposing you’re using Ubuntu (or Debian, or Mint, or any other distro with those repositories and using the apt package manager) it’d be easy enough to install.

You’d simply install cbm with the following command:

sudo apt install cbm

1	sudo apt install cbm

So, let’s pretend you’ve already got that cbm application installed…

Monitor Bandwidth In Real Time:

So, we’ll assume you’ve already installed cbm but you’re still going to need an open terminal to use cbm. Funny how that works! You know what, I’m just going to assume you’ve opened a terminal to install the application and skip that whole cookie-cutter silliness.

Well, now that you have cbm installed and you’ve run cbm in the terminal (which is your only option – I did mention this was absurdly simple), you’ll see an output similar to this:

cbm letting you monitor bandwidth in real time — It’s not polite to laugh at another man’s paltry bandwidth! Be polite!

Yes, yes I work just fine within these bandwidth constraints… Mostly…

As you can see, it shows each network interface.

How To: Show Your Network Interfaces

You can see that it shows how much data you receive, how much data you transmit, and the total. I did not let it run all that long for the screenshot, as that’s not necessary.

That’s pretty much it. There are few options and that’s a good thing.

You can press the + or – to change the refresh rate.

You can press B to change from bits to bytes.

When you’re done monitoring your bandwidth in real time, press Q to exit the application.

That’s it. That’s all you need to know. It’s a very purpose-built application. There aren’t a bunch of frills and options. This is one of those tools that does exactly what it says on the tin and nothing else. If you want to monitor bandwidth in real time, this is one way to do so.

Closure:

See? I told you this would be a nice and simple article. It’s easy to follow and easy to learn. There isn’t a whole lot to it. You can monitor bandwidth in real time with all sorts of tools, but this might be one of the easiest. The program doesn’t need to be updated. It doesn’t need additional bells and whistles.

Sorry for not checking on alternative distros. That takes a while and I have limited time to write these things. If you use other distros, you can help by leaving a comment to indicate if it is in your default repos or not. You can even go so far as showing how to install cbm. It won’t hurt and you don’t even have to use real information!

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