Category: General

Meta: Happy New Year From Linux-Tips!

So, it’s the start of a new year from Linux-Tips! Hopefully, your life is going well and you have grand plans (that you’ll accomplish) in the coming year. Now is the time to make those promises to yourself, or so they say. I’ve never had much luck with New Year’s Resolutions, but you might.

Which makes me ask this:

What plans do you have for your Linux computing in the new year?

You could resolve to learn Bash scripting or spend more time in the terminal. If such is your goal, you could resolve to spend time helping your favorite project. Another goal could be learning something new throughout the year, specifically about Linux.

You could also resolve to read this site every other day by signing up for the newsletter! LOL! You could even donate to cover some of the bandwidth costs at Linux-Tips! If forums are your thing, you could head on over to Linux.org to sign up for an account. There are all sorts of things to get you started on a new year’s worth of Linux learning.

Me? I’m going to keep doing what I do. I’ll continue writing more material for Linux-Tips. I’ll continue working within the community, as I already do. I enjoy giving my time to the community and so I do.

This site? I don’t want to turn this into one of those meta articles, but we’ve experienced 61% growth in unique visitors and 69% in visits. That’s pretty sweet considering the number of people complaining about Google’s more recent updates. (I get the vast majority of my traffic from search engines, specifically Google.)

So, we’ve had a pretty good year. I’ve enjoyed watching the growth and I’ll soon be posting the 500th article (which will be a real meta article). That’s an exciting accomplishment, in my opinion. Feel free to share your opinion.

Let’s have some fun in the terminal to celebrate the new year!

Happy New Year In The Terminal:

First, we want to install Figlet (FIGlet, technically – I think). You’ll need an open terminal, but that’s often accomplished by pressing the CTRL + ALT + T buttons on your keyboard. 

With your terminal now open, follow the appropriate instructions:

Debian/Ubuntu/etc:

RHEL/CentOS/etc:

So, yeah, that’s all that I can be sure of. Your distro may have this as well.

But, when you get Figlet installed, type the following into your terminal:

You should get an output similar to this:

There… (Hit the expand button, if you must. And you probably must.)

A nice and easy way to celebrate New Year’s Day is with your Linux terminal and an application known as Figlet. You’ve learned nothing of importance. You’ve spent little time. And, well, you’ve got a holiday to celebrate or recover from. (Unless you’re on the other side of the planet, in which case this is a day late.)

HINT: Use man figlet to find the many other text formatting options. This should keep you amused for at least a few minutes. There’s more to the output than what I’ve demonstrated in a simple holiday article.

Closure:

Well, we’ve learned to use Figlet to celebrate the new year in the Linux terminal. It’s something so simple, that anyone can do it – assuming it’s in your default repositories. If it isn’t, you could try the Toilet application or you could compile the application. Both of those seem reasonably fun.

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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.

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.

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!

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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