Category: Command Line

Check Your (Write) Disk Speed In The Terminal

Today we’re going to discuss one way for you to check your write disk speed in the terminal. That is, we’re going to learn how long it takes you to write data to your disk drives. It’s a very simple set of commands and easy enough for anyone to try. There are other methods, this is just one of them.

After all, I recently did an article that let you check your (read) disk speed in the terminal. I might as well do an article that lets you check your write disk speed in the terminal. The former article was about how fast you can read data from your disk drives. The current article is about how fast you can write data to your disk drives.

There’s not really all that much real world work that this is going to benefit. You’re able to read and write data as fast as you’re able to read and write data. If you want to change that, invest in different hardware. Knowing the read and write rates really doesn’t do you much good – it’s just an interesting bit of information and maybe a reason for you to brag to your friends.

Today we’ll be using the ‘dd’ command. Be sure to be careful with this command because once you set it loose it does exactly what you told it to do. It can and will cause you to reach for your backups… If you don’t know, ‘dd’ defines itself as a tool to convert and copy files. You should read the man page sometime. It’s a rather robust, and potentially complicated, application.

Anyhow…

Check Your (Write) Disk Speed In The Terminal:

This article requires an open terminal, like many other articles on this site. If you don’t know how to open the terminal, you can do so with your keyboard – just press CTRL + ALT + T and your default terminal should open.

The first thing we’re going to do is make a new directory and move to it.

Now, let’s start testing. I’m going to assume you have at least 10 GB worth of space (we’ll be using ~5.5 GB, or 5 GiB). If you do not have enough space, don’t run this command until you do have that much free disk space. The command to run the test is:

Here’s a test result on a slower, in use SSD, about what I expect most users to have:

It will show you the progress, as we’ve enabled that in the dd command. It won’t take all that long for the test to complete. Unless your drive was otherwise heavily occupied, there’s little to gain from running the test multiple times.

Anyhow,  how about we cleanup after ourselves? As the file was made with ‘sudo’ so too shall it be removed with ‘sudo’. It will probably even ask you for confirmation.

And delete the directory:

That should have cleaned up our mess, all nice and fancy like. There’s no real reason to keep a 5.4 GB test file hanging around and you already have the test results.

Closure:

There you have it! You now have another article and this one will show you how to check your write disk speeds for your drives. If you want to test other drives, just write the file to those drives by navigating there first in the terminal. ‘Snot all that difficult.

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How To: Remove AppArmor From Ubuntu

In today’s article, we’re going to learn how to remove AppArmor from Ubuntu. This will work for other distros, like Debian. It’s actually not a very difficult task to remove AppArmor from Ubuntu, but it’s not something you necessarily want to do. Just because you can, doesn’t mean you should…

As many of you know, I write many of these articles based on the notes I’ve taken over the years. I’m a little reluctant to write this one, because removing AppArmor is probably not the best of choices.

AppArmor is similar to the various jails and application isolation techniques. It’s a security tool that restricts applications to a constrained set of resources. If the application is then compromised, it only has access to that set of resources and not to the whole system.

In other words, unless you know what you’re doing, you almost certainly don’t want to remove AppArmor from Ubuntu. In fact, if you don’t know what you’re doing then doing this is almost certainly a ‘not-bright’ choice.

If you’re going to remove AppArmor, you should consider replacing it with something else. SELinux is an option that’s similar, though I suppose you could use something like Firejail and be prepared to craft your own application profiles.

Again, removing AppArmor from Ubuntu (or whatever distro you’re using that has it) is probably not a good idea. I include the article because the information is already out there and because some folks may just decide to operate their system without such protections. This is Linux, you have the freedom to make bad choices. This isn’t even the first time I’ve shown you how to make bad choices.

Remove AppArmor From Ubuntu:

Like oh so many of these articles, you’re gonna need an open terminal. Just press CTRL + ALT + T and your default terminal should open. (I say that a whole lot on this site.)

We should first check to ensure AppArmor exists and is running. To do so, enter the following command:

What you’re looking for is several lines into the output. You’re looking for ‘apparmor module is loaded‘. If you see that, AppArmor both exists and is running. So, the next step in removing AppArmor is to stop the service. You do that with:

In case AppArmor is somehow installed again, we’ll make sure that it won’t start at boot by disabling the service entirely. That seems like a good idea.

Finally, we nuke AppArmor from existence with a purge command:

And that should do it. You probably want to reboot, just to make sure there are no tendrils sticking around – but stopping the service first should mean you don’t need to. Either way, you have now removed AppArmor from your system – assuming you followed the directions.

Closure:

Again, and I can’t stress this enough, don’t do this unless you know what you’re doing and unless you have something to replace AppArmor with. It’s really a bad idea and you’ll gain very little. I wouldn’t even do this with a system air-gapped from the network, unless I had a very good reason to do so.

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Check Disk Speed In The Terminal

In today’s article, we’re going to learn how to check the disk speed in the terminal. When I say ‘disk’ I also mean drives, like SSDs. I could use ‘storage drive’, or perhaps just ‘drive’, but the word ‘disk’ is what I’m going with. So, if you have any questions about other devices – the answer is that it should work just fine if you want to speed test them. 

I should point out that we’ll only be checking disk read speeds. We won’t do any write tests today. We’re just going to see how fast we can read data from the disks we have installed.

There’s a number of ways to check the speed of your disks. You can do so with tools like Gnome Disks or HardInfo, for example. If you’d rather, you can do a full-blown benchmark of your Linux system with GeekBench. This article will explain how to check disk speed in the terminal, because why not? The GUI tools may provide more data, but you don’t always need more data.

The tool we’ll be using for this ‘hdparm’ and it’s available for any major distro out there. In fact, it may be installed by default. So, if you want to get a head start, check to see if you have it installed. If not, go ahead and install it – just like you’d install any other software.

Anyhow, the tool describes itself as:

hdparm – get/set hard disk parameters

Which sums it up nicely. If you check the man page with man hdparm, you’ll see it’s actually pretty complicated. Fortunately, we’ll just be using it to check the disk speed. It can be used to do all sorts of stuff, as you can see from the man page. Perhaps we’ll cover some of that in a future article?

Anyhow, there’s not a whole lot that goes into this. So, let’s jump right in.

Check The Disk Speed In The Terminal:

This article requires an open terminal, like many other articles on this site. If you don’t know how to open the terminal, you can do so with your keyboard – just press CTRL + ALT + T and your default terminal should open.

With the terminal open, you should first identify the disk you’re looking to test. You can list all your attached drives with:

Once you identify the drive you’re looking to check, you’ll almost certainly want to add a /dev/ in front of it – because that’s really where it’s mounted. So, if the disk you want to check is sda1, you’d use /dev/sda1. Even if it says something like /media/<user>/<drive_name>, you’ll still be using /dev/<disk>.

Now, to check the disk speed, you’ll use the following:

That gives you a good example result, including things like buffer and cache. If you want, you can actually check the direct disk speed as well. That just requires the --direct flag. It looks like this:

That’ll give you some results as though you were reading directly from the disk without a buffer involved. It’s an option to check, should you want to. But, you can get a good look at what your disk reads are going to be.

Closure:

That’s actually all there is to it. ‘Snot very difficult. Sure, hdparm is this big complicated application – but you can still use it to check the disk speed in the terminal. You don’t actually have to master all the options of these complicated applications in order to use them. You can still use them, learning more and more options as you use their features as needed.

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Install The Full Version of Vim In Ubuntu

Today, we’re going to show you how to install the full version of Vim in Ubuntu. Along the way, you may learn a few other things, but the process is simple enough. Even a new user can follow this article – I’d assume. I mean, I could follow it. I think…

Though, I’m not sure that a new user would opt for learning Vim. Either way, some of us will learn something from this article, even if it’s just me learning something from writing it. After all, if I read the headline aloud to you, our conversation might realistically start with this:

“But, KGIII, Ubuntu already comes with Vim installed!” You might say. “You don’t need to install it. D’uh!”

To which I’d respond, “You’d think so, and it appears to, but it actually only comes with a limited version of Vim. Watch, I’ll show you! Then we’ll install the full version of Vim.” 

See? It's a small version of Vim.
Check the highlighted line. See? It’s just the small version of Vim. It’s not the full version.

NOTE: We won’t be worrying about a GUI version of Vim. Maybe we can cover that in another article, but you can probably figure that one out on your own.

Now, Vim stands for Vi Improved, with Vi being a really, really old text editor (circa 1976) and Vim is an improvement on it. You’ll see it written as ViM or VIM from time to time, but if you go by the description in the man page, it’s simply “Vim”. Because of that, I’ve decided to spell it that way.

Actually, now that you know the initially installed Vim is just the small version (hint: tiny version), you can probably figure out the rest on your own. I have faith in you, my dear readers. Yes, yes I do… Still, I’ll tell you how, otherwise it’d be a pretty silly article!

Install The Full Version of Vim:

You’re going to want an open terminal for this one. If you don’t know how to open the terminal, you can do so with your keyboard – just press CTRL + ALT + T and your default terminal should open.

With your terminal open, run the following command:

Next, we want to install a full version of Vim. To do that:

There are also some GUI versions of Vim that may be in your default repositories. You can opt to install those, but we’ll not be covering those in this article. This article is just about how to install the full version of Vim.

Hmm… Well, that’s really all there is to it. I suppose you could string the commands together, all nice and fancy like…

Yeah… So, really, that’s all there is to this. However, the important thing is that most folks don’t realize that it’s not the full version of Vim that has been installed by default. It’s just the tiny version, which is lacking in features. If you want, you can verify the currently installed version of Vim with this command:

Assuming you’ve installed the full version of Vim, the output will look similar to:

The output shows that this is the full version of Vim.
Again, check the highlighted line to see the difference. As you see, it’s the full version. Sweet!

Closure:

Well, there you have it. You now know that Ubuntu’s initially installed version of Vim is just the tiny version of Vim. You also now know how to install the full version of Vim in Ubuntu. If you’re a fan of Vim, or would like to start learning Vim, this is probably a good thing to know.

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