Category: Command Line

When Did I Install Lubuntu

This won’t be a complicated article, nor will it be a very long article, as we answer the question of, “When did I install Lubuntu?” It’s a rather specific question and one you can answer with a couple of different commands. Fortunately, this is also going to apply to Ubuntu, Mint, Debian, and all the rest that are set up in this manner.

You may not recall the exact date and time when you installed Lubuntu. That’s okay, most of us don’t keep track of that information. At some point, you may want to know that information. It’s not a major data point, but knowing when you installed Lubuntu can be useful.

Yes, this article is about Lubuntu. It’s specific to Lubuntu because I use Lubuntu as I type this. There are other distros where this will work perfectly well. Tomorrow is my birthday and I’m not going to test a bunch of distros.

If you’re unfamiliar with Lubuntu, it’s a Linux distro that I’m a big fan of. It’s not the best Linux distro, it’s the best distro for me. I’ve written a whole lot of Lubuntu articles!

List Installed Software In Lubuntu
Benchmark Your GPU In Lubuntu
How To: Zip Files In Lubuntu
Let’s Mount An .iso In Lubuntu
Disable Window Grouping In Lubuntu
(And many more Lubuntu articles…)

Lubuntu is a great distro that has a familiar interface, great support, a wonderful community and is easy to adapt to. A Windows user can be up and running Lubuntu in an hour – if they take their time. As I say, “Things are where you’d logically expect them to be.

Anyhow, the question is when did you install Lubuntu…

When Did I Install Lubuntu:

This is going to require an open terminal. As we’re using Lubuntu, you can open your default terminal by pressing CTRL + ALT + T on your keyboard. The tools you need will be already installed.

Now, you can identify your storage drives with lsblk but we’ll use the following command, as it’s easier for this task.

From there, you want to find your / partition. For example, here’s my output:

In this case, the output is /dev/nvme0n1p1 and not any of the other choices.

If you were using something like Mint, the output might be similar to this:

In that case, the output is /dev/sda2 largely because I’m using UEFI on that system and the first partition is occupied with that data.

The syntax you’re looking for to find out when you installed Lubuntu is pretty simple. You have two choices that will work. They are as follows:

Or:

So, on my Lubuntu system, the command would look like:

While on Mint it would look like this:

Of course, you can switch it up with the dumpe2fs command, per the instructions.

NOTE: This works on ext* formatted partitions. If you did some sort of weird, non-default, installation, then it may not work for you. I can’t be 100% certain because I didn’t test this.

The tools we’ve used are tune2fs, which is already installed and is described as:

tune2fs – adjust tunable file system parameters on ext2/ext3/ext4 filesystems

And, we’ve used the dumpe2fs command which is already installed and described as:

dumpe2fs – dump ext2/ext3/ext4 file system information

So, I can only assume that other drive formats aren’t going to work and that information simply won’t be stored. They might work. I simply do not know and haven’t taken the time to look into it. That means this will work for the vast majority of users.

Closure:

If you have ever asked yourself, “When did I install Lubuntu?” This is the article for you. I admit, it’s rather specific, but it is what it is. If you want to try this with other systems, go ahead! It won’t break anything and it just might work. If you’ve partitioned your drives with a different formatting, it’s probably not going to work but trying these commands will not break anything.

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How To: Show User Information In The Linux Terminal

There comes a time in many Linux journeys when you want to know how to show user information in the Linux terminal. Well, if you’ve been waiting for such an article, this article is for you. After all, knowing about the various users might be important information for you.

You may not realize this, but your Linux system has all sorts of users. They belong to varied groups, sometimes more than one group at a time. Unless you’re already familiar with this subject, you probably have more users than you realize. 

That’s perfectly okay. It’s entirely normal to have different users. Linux is a user-oriented operating system. Users have varied permissions and can perform different tasks based on those permissions. 

This actually shouldn’t be a complicated article. It’s just a couple of commands, though the command may not be well-known among the newer Linux users. New users should familiarize themselves with the concepts of a multi-user system and with groups.

Anyhow, you shouldn’t need to install anything. The tools we’ll be using should be installed by default. You will need an open terminal. So, you have been warned. After all, it was right there in the title!

lslogins:

The tool we’ll expose you to today is ‘lslogins‘, which should be installed by default. You can verify that lslogins is installed with this command:

And, if you check the man page (with man lslogins) you’ll see this:

lslogins – display information about known users in the system

So, sure enough, that looks like it’s the correct tool for the job. Our goal is to show user information in the Linux terminal. This looks like a good way to go about it.

Show User Information In The Linux Terminal:

Yes, we’re doing this in the terminal. You can frequently open your terminal by pressing CTRL + ALT + T. Otherwise, you’ll find a terminal emulator somewhere within your application menu. It’s likely to be in the admin section of said menu.

With your terminal open, you can start with the basics. That is, we’re going to show all the known users with the lslogins command. That syntax is so simple.

You’ve got a lot of users. You may not know it yet, but you do. Here’s an example output from my system:

Now, that’s all well and good.

But…

Let’s say you only want to show user information about one single user. That’s fine and you can do that in a variety of ways. You can also do it just as easily with the lslogins command, simply by using the -u flag. 

The syntax is as follows:

An example output might look like this:

And there’s the information about the root user. You can try with your username and get information about things like the groups you belong to and more. Go ahead and give it a shot, you won’t break anything. I promise you won’t break anything with this command!

Closure:

You never know when you’re going to want to show user information in the terminal. It is useful information, especially when debugging things like permission errors. You may find you need to add yourself to a group or things like that. So, store this command away in your mental bank and save it for when you need this information.

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Find Out If A Package Is Installed In Debian

Today we’ll have a quick and easy article where we find out if a package is installed in Debian. There are times when you’re unsure of which packages are already installed. Today’s article looks to help with that, letting you know how to find out if a package is already installed.

Depending on where you live, yesterday was a holiday. A nice and easy article seems like a good idea. It’s actually a holiday as I write this, but that’s okay. I’d probably have written it ahead of time but Mother Nature was having her way with me and my neighbors. So, this is being written on Christmas Day. That’s another good reason to keep this short.

If you’re unaware, Debian is a Linux distro. Debian is one of the elders among distros, having just turned 30 not long before writing this article. It’s a very popular distro that has stood the test of time.

Debian also has a whole lot of derivatives. Then, there are derivatives of Debian derivatives. For example, there’s Ubuntu (and all the flavors) which has many derivatives, such as Linux Mint. While less common, there are probably derivatives of derivatives. By now someone has probably at least made a derivative of Linux Mint! (I did not look.)

That means that today’s article will apply to almost all of them. There’s bound to be an outlier, but anything still using apt or dpkg is good to go and will be able to use the information in this article. You won’t need to install anything, but you will need an open terminal.

Find Out If A Package Is Installed In Debian

Today’s article will involve the terminal. You can easily use a GUI for this. Just open your software manager to search for the package name. In this case, we’ll use a terminal and you can usually open your terminal by pressing CTRL + ALT + T.

You won’t need to install anything to determine if a package is installed in Debian. Everything you need, all the tools you’ll need, should be preinstalled. The tools you’ll be using:

dpkg:

You can use dpkg as one tool for this job. Given my preferences, this is the tool I’ll use for this job, simply because I like the output better. If you check the man page, you’ll see dpkg is described like so:

dpkg – package manager for Debian

That’s a pretty good-sounding description for the task. After all, we want to find out if a package is installed in Debian.

The syntax to do this with dpkg is quite simple:

For example (in Mint):

As you can see, Firefox is indeed installed. You should also remember that this operation is case-sensitive. This generally means you want lowercase letters.

apt:

You can also use apt to find out if a package is installed in Debian. If you don’t already know, apt is one of the tools you can use to manage packages in Debian. Think of apt (and apt-get, the stable cousin) as a front-end for Debian’s dpkg. The man page isn’t all that descriptive at first:

apt – command-line interface

But, if you look a little further, you’ll see:

apt provides a high-level commandline interface for the package management system.

So, apt is another fine tool to use for finding out if a package is installed in Debian. It too has a rather simple syntax and it looks like this:

For example (in Mint):

In this case, you can safely ignore the warning. Again, this is case-sensitive and you’ll almost certainly want lowercase letters in your command.

Closure:

See? A nice and easy article for you. It’s not all that difficult to find out if a package is installed in Debian. This is something you can do quite quickly with an open terminal emulator. It’s something easy enough to remember, as well.

Today’s article was nothing too taxing and is something that can come in handy because, if you’re like me, you can’t possibly remember all the packages you’ve installed. Then, when you do install packages, you’re often installing dependencies.

Keeping track of all of those packages manually would be a tedious process! Just a little bit of terminal knowledge makes quick work of this and the commands are easy enough to memorize. Try them a few times and you might just remember them by rote.

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Revisiting Christmas In The Terminal

Well, it’s the day before Christmas and a Linux Christmas can mean having Christmas in the terminal. If you do not celebrate the holiday, that’s fine. You can skip this article and move along. If you do celebrate this holiday, you might as well have a Merry Linux Christmas!

Last year, we had Christmas in the terminal. This year, we’ll be doing the same thing – but not in the same way. If you want an easier and quicker way to have Christmas in the terminal, you should follow along with the first article. This one is quite a bit more involved.

Let’s Have Christmas In The Terminal

That one is nice and easy! I’m also writing this article quite a ways ahead of time. I’ll schedule it for the nearest possible day. Due to my publication schedule, this won’t be published on the holiday itself.

NOTE: I did this on Linux Mint 21.2, Cinnamon Edition. That just happened to be the computer I was using. You may not need all of these steps if you’re using a different distro. You may already have things like Go and Git available.

We’ll be playing with all sorts of silliness and doing things we’d not normally do on this site. I’ll give clear directions, as much as I can. I won’t be diving into details like I have lately. This is a holiday article and ain’t nobody got time for that!

Linux Christmas In The Terminal:

You will need an open terminal. As I did this in Mint, I was able to open a terminal by just pressing CTRL + ALT + T which is something you too should be able to do in most distros.

With your terminal now open, let’s get into a good directory:

Next, we’ll install Git.

Then we’ll download some files with Git.

Now we move to the new directory:

This is in the language known as Go, so let’s get set up to compile that.

Now we’ll do some compilation magic.

Let that finish and run this command:

With any luck, you’ll see something like this in your terminal:

Tada! It even has blinking lights! That’s a rather festive terminal!

You can exit the program by pressing CTRL + C.

Of course, you can move the ctree file anywhere you want. If you want to just run it from the terminal, copy it to /usr/local/bin and you can do that. This being a temporary thing, I saw no reason to move the binary to a special location. If you do want to just run it anywhere in the terminal, you’d use this command:

Enjoy your holiday celebrations!

Closure:

I don’t think this can become a tradition or anything like that. There are only so many Christmas-themed things out there that you can do in the terminal. I didn’t create this and I have no idea what I’ll be able to find for the next Christmas. We’ll have to wait and see what next year brings. Until then, keep being you!

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Upgrade Linux Mint In The Termanal

If you have chosen Linux Mint as your distro then you have a handy GUI way to upgrade, but today we’ll upgrade Linux Mint in the terminal. This won’t be entirely pointless, as we’ll be doing things the GUI method of upgrading doesn’t do. By the end of this article, you should be comfortable upgrading your system in the terminal.

Additionally, this is going to work for other related distros. This article will apply to you if you use Debian, Ubuntu, an official Ubuntu flavor, and many other distros. More specifically, if you have access to apt, this will apply to your computer.

There are a few confusing terms here. I’ll do what I can to explain.

We often use ‘update’ and ‘upgrade’ interchangeably. I do that myself. In the sense of this article, an update means you’re refreshing the software available to you and then you’d upgrade to the newest versions of that software. So, in the sense of the commands used, they’re not interchangeable.

We’ll be using apt for this article. APT is short for Advanced Package Manager. This is the most common method of managing packages in the terminal, at least for those distributions that use apt. If you check the man page, you’ll see:

apt – command-line interface

And that’s not too descriptive. If we read on, we’ll see:

apt provides a high-level commandline interface for the package
management system.

That’s a bit more promising, as updating and upgrading is indeed managing packages. So, that’s what we’ll be using and you won’t need to install anything if you’re using Linux Mint.

Upgrade Linux Mint In The Terminal:

As you can see, I mentioned that this is to be done in the terminal. That means you need an open terminal. Just press CTRL + ALT + T and your default terminal should open.

With your terminal now open, let’s update the database to see what new software is available for your system. That’s an easy command:

The output will tell you to do so, but you can check the available upgrades with the following command:

You could update them manually, one by one, but you can just use this command:

That will install all of your available updates without asking you for permission to proceed. If the updates do require manual input, it will stop to ask you for your input.

Now, there’s another tool. We can clean up after ourselves, removing software that doesn’t need to be installed anymore. This happens and happens with some regularity. You can run the following command:

If you’d like, you can combine all these commands into a single command:

You can alias that, or leave it in your Bash history, and run that regularly to keep your system updated with the latest (and most secure, generally speaking) software.

Closure:

Yup… It was still a weekend when I wrote this. I also have guests that will be here for a while. So, it’s a fairly short article – but it’s a useful article for those who are running Linux Mint. After all, it’s not all that challenging to upgrade Linux Mint from the terminal and that’s something all Linux Mint users may wish to learn. If you’re in that group, this article is for you…

Thanks for reading! If you want to help, or if the site has helped you, you can donate, register to help, write an article, or buy inexpensive hosting to start your site. If you scroll down, you can sign up for the newsletter, vote for the article, and comment.

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