Category: Command Line

Let’s Install Nano (With Some Bonus Information)

This site mentions Nano quite a few times but never tells you how to install Nano. Today, this changes! Today, we make sure you have Nano available! Not all distros have Nano installed by default, but in pretty much all distros Nano would be a useful tool to have.

The Nano text editor (GNU nano) has been around since 1991, 21 years at the time of writing. I’ve written about it a few times, but nothing major. I think the most I’ve written about it was in an article about My Three Favorite Text Editors. If it’s not obvious from all of this, Nano is one of my favorite editors.

Rather than gush, I think I’ll just explain why I like Nano. It’s simple. When making quick edits to text from the terminal, I don’t need to know things like :q! just to exit the program, I can see how to exit the program because it’s written at the bottom. Nano has plenty of features, even a viable, albeit not great, find-and-replace function.

In Nano, you can do the obvious text manipulation tasks – like cut and paste, of course. You can jump to line numbers and all that stuff. At the end of the day, it’s a great terminal text editor that just works and is simple to use. If you’re new to Linux and think Nano looks daunting, you should introduce yourself to Vim or Emacs!

I like simplicity and effectiveness. For the things I do in that situation, quick file creation or editing, it works just fine. I don’t need anything more robust – or more complex.

Install Nano:

Sadly, Nano doesn’t come installed by default on all distros. It’s a tiny application that just works, so I’d be happy to see it as the default (or available by default) on more distros. Until that time, we’re stuck installing it ourselves.

Fortunately, there’s not much trouble installing Nano in the major distros. You just need to start with an open terminal. You can open one with your keyboard. Just pressing CTRL + ALT + T should open up your default terminal. Pick the appropriate command below and it should install nano for you.

Arch/derivatives:

RHEL/Fedora/derivatives:

OpenSUSE/derivatives:

Debian/Ubuntu/derivatives:

For everyone else, hunt around or download and compile it from source. 

Once you have Nano installed, you’ll need to know how to use it. Fortunately, for most users and most uses, there are a few shortcuts to learn and that’s it. For most people, you don’t need to know a whole lot for basic functionality. As you’re making basic edits, that works. It’s pretty easy.

My usual blurb (that I cut and paste) to tell people how to save a file in Nano is just this little snippet:

(Which, when formatted properly, comes out looking like “press CTRL + X, then Y, and then ENTER“.)

And, that’s it. That’s pretty much all you need to know when making quick text edits in Nano. However, there’s so much more to Nano than you might be expecting.

Bonus Nano Info:

While Nano is simple, it is deceptively simple. If you type nano into the terminal, you’ll see just a few options on the bottom. And, like I said, that too is a bit deceptive. With your terminal still open, type the following:

As you can see, there are a whole lot more options. There are far too many options for me to even begin to touch on them, and you won’t need any/most of them for the basic text editing for which we usually rely on Nano.

You can open a file with Nano like this:

You can also just open an instance of Nano and name the file when you’re closing it. If you want to create the title when you’re starting, you can just use:

That’ll auto-populate the name field when you’re saving the file. So, you can use Nano to create a new text file easily enough.

While you’re in there, you can use CTRL + W to search. If you then use ALT + W to go to the next instance of the text you searched for. Searching is even kind enough to support regex, case-sensitive searches, and can even be used to replace text.

At the bottom of the output, you’ll see directions that tell you how to use Nano. The ^ means you use the CTRL as the modifier. The M (such as M-A to undo) means you use the ALT as the modifier. So, to cut, you’d use CTRL + K and to undo something you’d use the previously mentioned ALT + M.

You’ll get used to it, I promise. You’ll learn it much faster than you’ll learn Vim or Emacs – but those too have their place. I wouldn’t want to spend hours in Nano, but it’s great for a few minutes when you need to make a quick edit.

Like I said, this is just touching on the surface. Look at the man page ( man nano) for more information. There’s a lot to this little editor and the advanced features are there if you need them. For example, I often open files with the -l flag so that it will show line numbers.

Closure:

Yup… There’s another article. This one tells you how to install Nano and has some bonus information about how to use Nano. I didn’t have time (and this isn’t that kind of site) to tell you about all the other nano options. Those options are just a man nano command away, should you want to use them.

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Time A Command To See How Long It Takes To Run

Have you ever wanted to time a command? Well, you can! Linux includes the ability to time a command, so that you can know how long it took for a command to be processed. 

Today, we’ll be using the ‘time‘ command. Time is simply (and accurately) described in the man page as:

time – run programs and summarize system resource usage

The time command is a pretty nifty tool and the output will tell you the real time that it took, as well as the system time, to run the command you’re timing. There’s really not a whole lot more to say about the time command. It does what it says on the tin. It times stuff!

This is going to just be a quick article and should be easy to follow. There’s not a whole lot to explain and it’s pretty straightforward. If you’re looking to get your feet wet playing in the terminal, this is probably a good article to start with.

Time A Command:

Just like oh so many of these articles, you’ll need an open terminal. So, let’s crack open your default terminal by pressing CTRL + ALT + T on your keyboard.

Now, let’s take the simple command to list everything in a directory:

To find out how long it took to list all the files and folders in a directory, you could use:

The output of that command tells you how long it took to list all the items in a directory beneath the results. It should not have taken long. If you want to try something bigger, something that lasts longer, you can take a look at this command:

That should take a just a little more time to run in your terminal, but how much longer? Well, you can can actually see how long it really took by adding ‘time’ in front of it. Obviously, it’d look something like this:

The output at the end is something like this:

real 0m0.566s
user 0m0.423s
sys 0m0.143s

The ‘real‘ is how much time it really took. The ‘user‘ is how much time it took for the user. The ‘sys‘ is how much time it took for the system – the amount of time that the kernel actually devoted to running that command.

You can time all sorts of stuff. Like, here’s an example output from me updating my system with time sudo apt update (not all of us have big, fat pipes from the ISP):

When I purged Krita (from a previous article), the output from time sudo apt purge krita looks like:

Have fun with it, if you want. Find out how long those tasks actually are, so that you can get a reasonable estimate of where you’re spending your time in the terminal. You can even use it like time nano <file_name> and see how long it took you to edit a file in the terminal!

Like I said, have fun with it. You might find some of those tasks that seem to go slow really don’t take all that much time. Maybe you’ll find out that the reverse is true? One thing is pretty certain, however. If you didn’t have it before, you now have ‘time’ as a new tool in your Linux toolbox.

Closure:

Well, there’s another article. This one has taught you how to time a command in the Linux terminal. It’s a little tool, probably not all that useful, but it’s one that’s there. If you happen to use the time command on a regular basis, please leave a comment letting us know why. I’m sure there’s some real-world uses, but other than looking for bottlenecks or real-time optimizations I can’t really think of any.

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Benchmark Your Linux Box With Geekbench 5

Today’s article will teach you how to benchmark your Linux box with Geekbench 5. It’s a fairly simple exercise, even for a beginner. Parts of the directions for this exercise will change with time, so I hope to make it obvious how you would make said command changes.

What is a benchmark? It’s a measure of your system’s performance. In this case, it tests things like CPU performance, graphics performance, and memory performance. When done, it gives you a handy URL where you can see the results online and share them with your friends.

For example, I have a benchmark result here. That one isn’t as good as it could have been. For example, I had a pile of applications open and hadn’t even been rebooted in about 60 days. See?

Ideally, you’ll run your benchmark with a clean slate. That’ll give you the best results. Be sure to reboot and make sure you’re running as few processes as is reasonable to get the best result.

Why benchmark? Well, it’s good to know how your hardware stacks up. It’s also good for bragging rights, if you’re into that sort of thing. It’s a valuable bit of information if you’re into overclocking. (Overclocking is tweaking at the hardware level to make your system run faster than it is designed for.) It’s a way to measure the performance gains from overclocking.

Well, this article will tell you how to benchmark, using Geekbench 5. It’s not as challenging as one might think!

Benchmark Linux With Geekbench 5:

This article requires an open terminal. 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.

Once you get your terminal open, run the following commands:

That’s going to download the Geekbench 5 benchmarking software for Linux. However, that URL is going to change because the name of the download is going to change when Geekbench releases new versions.

If it has changed – and it WILL change eventually – you can get the new address by clicking on this link. The name of the file is also going to change the following command. It’s an obvious change that you’ll need to make. The current next command is:

That will extract all the files into their own directory. The directory name will also change. So, for this particular file, the next command is this:

Oddly, I didn’t need to make the “geekbench5” file executable, I just ran it with sudo. It looks like:

Now, you wait…

It shouldn’t take very long, though it may take a while on older computers. It will tell you what it’s checking as it checks it and, when done, it will give you a URL to check your results. It’ll look something like this:

geekbench click to see results
That address is where you’ll be able to see your results. Uploading is mandatory with the free version.

You can pay for a copy of Geekbench 5 and get your results locally, or so I understand. I’ve not actually tried it. The free version uploads the results, which I presume they use to crunch additional data, gauging the computers currently in use. They may even provide said data to others, but I’m sure it’s reasonably anonymous. Their privacy policy is located here.

Closure:

And there you have it. You now have your benchmark results in a handy web-page. You can also register to keep track of your previous benchmarks, even adding new results to your collection as you go. Me? I only bothered benchmarking my test laptop and it turned out better than I had expected.

There are other benchmarking utilities. You can use ‘hardinfo’ for some benchmarks, even comparative benchmarks – but older ones, by reading my hardinfo article. If you do benchmark your systems, feel free to leave some comments here or wherever you find this on social media.

Thanks for reading!

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How To: Create And Enable A Swapfile

Today’s article is about how you can create and enable a swapfile. It largely ignores the debate about whether a swapfile is needed or not, though I make it clear that this is something I prefer. I know that others will have different views, but I also make it clear why I enable it.

A swapfile, or swap partition, isn’t just where the OS crams stuff when it has run out of RAM. It’s more complicated than that. Sometimes, the OS knows where it wants to store cached items and prefers the swap partition or swap file.  The OS can put items in swap while freeing up RAM for other bits that need caching. 

To make it abundantly clear, you absolutely can use Linux without a swapfile. You can also use Linux with a swapfile. If you want to enable a swapfile, read on. I’ll touch on this a little bit later in the article.

Some Swapfile Background:

I have a modern, large SSD and more RAM than I’ll ever possibly use. I still want to use swap, in this case a swapfile. Imagine my dismay when I installed Lubuntu 20.04 and found there’s no swapfile available during the basic installation? (It’s there in 21.04 and proceeding versions.)

no swapfile
See? There’s nothing there!

I could have manually made a swap partition during installation, but that didn’t seem like something I wanted to do – and messing with manual partitioning can be tiresome and tedious. I knew I could enable a swapfile later, which is what I did.

Again, trying to avoid the debate – just sharing my reasoning; I have ample disk space and storage is cheap. If it has any chance of helping, it’s a small investment. I should also mention that swap is far more complicated than ‘a place where the kernel sticks stuff when there’s no more RAM left’. In fact, it’s a lot more complicated than that. It’s where the kernel pages content that’s seldom used, and it’ll happily use swap even when there’s plenty of RAM available.

Since the option to enable a swapfile isn’t there during the installation, we might as well learn how to add a swapfile to Ubuntu. It’s a pretty painless process. 

Is Swap Already Enabled?

You should first check to see if you already have swap enabled. The process is the same with both a swap partition and a swapfile. To check we first need to open your terminal emulator. You can do that by pressing CTRL + ALT + T.

Now, let’s check to see if you’ve already got some swap going on.

If the output of that command shows nothing but a new line, you have no swap. If it says anything else, you’ve got swap enabled already and this article is not one you need to read. As this article is only about a swapfile, it won’t be helpful for questions about a swap partition. This article also won’t tell you how to resize your swapfile, though you could put some pieces together and figure it out for yourself.

Let’s Make A Swapfile:

Seeing as you already have your terminal open from the previous step, you can just leave it open. That’ll make this easier. Start with this first command and work your way through the article – making sure to not skip any steps.

Why 8 gigabytes when I have ample RAM and an SSD? Because I don’t want to worry about it ever it again. I should be able to open up every app I have and leave them open for a month. You do you and decide how big you want it to be!

Now that we’ve allocated space for the swapfile, we need to set some permissions. We don’t want anyone and their kid brother writing to swap, we only want root writing to swap.

Next, we need to let the OS know that’s swap space, to be used as a swapfile.

Then you turn it on with:

And you now have swap in the form of a swapfile and it’s turned on.

Permanently Enable A Swapfile:

I suppose we should make this change permanent, as it’d be an unneeded step to have to do it every time the system reboots. To make this permanent, we need to edit fstab and nano is a good tool for this.

And add this at the bottom of that document:

Those are 0, the digit, in case the font here makes it confusing. And seeing as we’re using nano, you save your by pressing CTRL + X, then Y, and then ENTER. 

At the end of this exercise, you should have a swapfile that gets loaded on reboot.  You shouldn’t even have to reboot for it to effect, it should already be currently loaded and working. You can next edit the swappiness value, if that’s something you feel like you want to do – or have a reason to do. In Ubuntu, it is a default of 60. If you want to edit it, you’ll have to wait for another article.

Closure:

There you have it! We’re on the downhill side of this project and it’s an article about how you enable a swapfile. If you don’t use swap, that’s fine. This article is for those who do want to use swap.

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 own site. If you scroll down, you can sign up for the newsletter, vote for the article, and comment.

Get Hardware Info With ‘dmidecode’

Today’s article will explain how to use dmidecode to get information about your hardware. The command is a little different than most, as it actually checks your system’s BIOS and reports that information.

Yes, you read that correctly. This dmidecode command checks the BIOS and reports that information. There are times when the BIOS reports different hardware than other tools, so it’s a good idea to have some knowledge about your hardware to begin with.

Anyhow, I could sit here and try to explain dmidecode, or I could just use their description – which is better than I could do.

dmidecode is a tool for dumping a computer’s DMI (some say SMBIOS ) table contents in a human-readable format. This table contains a description of the system’s hardware components, as well as other useful pieces of information such as serial numbers and BIOS revision. Thanks to this table, you can retrieve this information without having to probe for the actual hardware. While this is a good point in terms of report speed and safeness, this also makes the presented information possibly unreliable.

As you can see, it’s a pretty interesting tool. It’s almost certainly installed for you by default. If it isn’t and you’re using a major distribution, check your system’s repos and it’ll be in there. It’s a pretty neat tool and one that you can use regularly, even though there are other tools that tell you about your hardware.

Using dmidecode:

This article requires an open terminal. Open one with your keyboard by pressing CTRL + ALT + T and your default terminal should open.

Many distros have dmidecode installed by default. If not, you’ll need to install it with your systems software installer. It’s bound to be available for any major distro. Now…

There’s a whole lot to this dmidecode thing, so we’re going to rely on the man page quite a bit. You’re encouraged to crack open a second terminal in which to run man dmidecode. That’ll help!

The first way to run dmidecode is with the -s flag, where you’ll use a name. In your first terminal, type the following to get the BIOS vendor’s name:

That’s the first (and pretty handy) way to run this command. Some of these commands will even give you information that helps you not have to open the case. That one helps you find the BIOS vendor’s name without having to reboot and check the BIOS yourself.

There are quite a number of options (names) that follow the -s flag, such as baseboard-serial-number, processor-family, or even chassis-serial-number. There’s a ton of them – so switch to the terminal with the open man page and check the text next to the -s flag for more information.

The other way to run dmidecode is with the -t flag. In this usage, you’ll need to know the corresponding number to the information you want. That’s okay, you don’t need to memorize them, as I explain below. The basic command is:

The number should correspond to the information you want. In the terminal with the open man page, you can scroll down to see your options. You’ll see that #13 is about the BIOS language, so command would look like:

The output would look similar to this:

dmidecode showing bios language
There’s some cruft in the output, but it is indeed the BIOS language.

You can refer to the above-mentioned man page, memorize them, or use a cheat sheet (if you plan on running the command frequently). I assume the project keeps things updated, so checking the man page at their GitHub would be the most correct source.

Either way, you will see that you will need to know both ways of running dmidecode in order to make the most out of dmidecode. You’ll need to be both fluent with the keywords and with the DMI Types, should you want to make the most out of this application – but you don’t have to memorize the entire man page.

Closure:

There you have it, another article is in the books! This time, it’s about dmidecode – a valuable tool to add to your growing arsenal of tools. It’ll save some time if you end up needing it, so you might as well learn about it before you need it.

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 own site. If you scroll down, you can sign up for the newsletter, vote for the article, and comment.

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