A Little About The ‘lsusb’ Command.

Today’s article will not be all that long or all that complicated, as we’ll just be learning a little about the ‘lsusb’ command. It seems like a good idea to cover it now, early in the year. I’ve been meaning to get to writing this article for a while.

Over the next few days, you will probably see some similar-looking articles. This is just the start. There are other similar commands and we’re going to cover those. Many of my readers will know some (or all) about these commands, and that’s okay. After all, our goal is getting people up to speed.

Today’s command will be the ‘lsusb’ command. If you check the man page, it’s described accurately – like so:

lsusb – list USB devices

As you can see, you use the ‘lsusb’ command when you want to learn about your system’s USB buses and the devices connected to them. You shouldn’t need to install anything. The ‘lsusb’ application is almost certainly available by default.

We probably won’t be covering all the ‘lsusb’ options. We’re just going to cover those options that you’re most likely to use. There’s always the man page for when you want more options. There’s really no need to get to deep in an article like this.

About The ‘lsusb’ Command:

The ‘lsusb’ command is a command that’s run only in the terminal. So, of course, you’ll need to have an open terminal available. If you just press CTRL + ALT + T and your default terminal should open. Tada! It’s pure witchcraft!

With your terminal now open, the simplest form of ‘lsusb’ is to just run the command without any flags. Like so:

You’ll likely get an output similar to this:

output from the 'lsusb' command
This is just the ‘lsusb’ output from a handy laptop. It’s pretty basic, with nothing connected.

As you can see, it’s not always just the actual USB ports on the side of your device that are USB devices. In the above screenshot, you can see that the wireless card, webcam, and Bluetooth devices are all on the USB bus. They’re not actually connected to a physical USB port, they’re just using the same underlying tech without actually having physical ports.

There are other things you can do with ‘lsusb’, like view the output in tree format. This is great if you’ve got things like USB hubs with things attached to them. It’s good organization and the command is simply:

The only other ‘lsusb’ command you’re likely to use is the ‘verbose’ mode. Like oh so many other applications, that’s the -v flag. The command looks like:

This is not to be confused with lsusb -V – which will show you the version. If you do that, you’ll also learn that the ‘lsusb’ command is a part of the ‘usbutils’ package. 

There’s not all that much more to the ‘lsusb’ command. Those are the ‘lsusb’ commands I’ve found myself using more than any others. They’re also the most used commands I’d ask a user to run when diagnosing a problem with their USB devices. If you want, you can learn more by checking the man page:

There’s more information in the man page about running the ‘lsusb’ command. Feel free to check it out and ask any questions needed.

Closure:

I’m going to cover some pretty basic stuff in the next few articles. I may intersperse them with other articles, so that folks don’t get bored. Don’t be bashful, leave a comment or two if you want. I love getting new comments and the site’s starting to grow quite nicely. Get your comments in early!

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Show RAM Information With Ramfetch

Today’s article is going to be an interesting one, an article where you learn how to show RAM information with Ramfetch. For many of you, I expect Ramfetch will be a completely new application, which is nice. However, this article should be simple enough for even a new user. Read on and learn more about your RAM!

By now, you’ve seen some of the following articles:

Neofetch
Screenfetch
CPUfetch

Well, this time around, we’re going to be using a similar application – but one meant specifically for RAM. The name of this application is ‘Ramfetch‘. Let’s just say the idea will be familiar, as you’re already aware of similar applications. At the end, you end up with a handy screen to screenshot to show your friend and family – or to learn from. Bragging rights is always a good reason!

So, then why would you want to do this? Well, Ramfetch gives you some good information about your RAM. It’ll do the basics, like show you what’s free, what’s available, and the total amount of RAM. But, it shows you quite a bit more than that, and it’s data worth looking at for those who want to know more about their RAM.

What we’ll be doing is cloning a git repository, moving a file, and changing the permissions to ensure it can be executed so that you can run the command from anywhere within the terminal.

You’ll need ‘git’ installed, and that should be installed by default in pretty much every major distro. If it’s not, check your package manager – or simply follow the URL in the article and perform the operations manually.

With all that said, let’s just jump into the article!

Show RAM Information With Ramfetch:

Of course, you’re going to need an open terminal. Ramfetch is a terminal-based tool. So, open your default terminal emulator. 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.

UPDATE: Without letting me know, they changed things up. Follow these new instructions.

With your terminal open, let’s clone the project:

Now, let’s move it to a directory where you can always use it from the terminal, regardless of which directory you’re in:

The next step is to make Ramfetch executable:

With that said and done, just execute the ‘ramfetch’ command to show RAM information with Ramfetch. It’s simply:

Your output might look a little something like this:

ramfetch output
See? It gives you quite a bit of information about your RAM. Handy, huh?

There you have it. You can now show RAM information with Ramfetch! Pretty simple, huh? There’s no man page and the ramfetch --help command doesn’t really show you any other ways to run Ramfetch.

Here’s a better image, as supplied by the author of Ramfetch (o69mar):

Another Ramfetch image.
It does indeed look better, so there’s that!

Closure:

There’s another article said and done. Welcome to the new year and I hope you had a safe New Year’s Eve this year. We start the new year off with a simple enough command, learning how to show RAM information with Ramfetch.

I’ve not missed a publication schedule yet, so we’ll see how much longer this can go on. (I’m sure I’ll miss a publication deadline at some point, but today is not that day. In fact, I wrote this days ahead of time!) So far, so good! I never thought it’d reach this level, by the way.

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.

A Couple Of Ways To Get Your Graphics Card Information

Today’s article is just a simple affair, one where I show you a couple of ways to get your graphics card information in the terminal. If that’s the sort of information you’re looking for, this is the article for you. So, do read on!

Using the commands in this article will give you some details that you probably haven’t committed to memory, so it’s a good way to learn your graphics card information. We’re just going to cover a couple of ways – as this is one of those things that can be learned with all sorts of tools.

This article shouldn’t be all that difficult or very long. It’s suitable even for a beginner, allowing new users to get to a point where they’re more comfortable working in the terminal. You largely just need to cut and paste.

We won’t really be doing anything all that new. We’ll use a couple of pretty standard commands to show hardware information, but we’ll then narrow that information down to just showing the graphics card information. So, this isn’t rocket science, it’s just using the terminal to glean the information we are after.

So, with all that in mind – and no further need to write an intro, let’s just head right into the article…

Find Your Graphics Card Information:

Yup. You guessed it. We’re gonna need an open terminal for this one. So open up your favorite 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.

The first command is just using ‘lspci’. The ‘lspci’ command lists PCI (peripheral component interconnect) information. We’ll then use a pipe and grep to extract just the information we’re after and nothing more. The command we’ll use to find your graphics card information would be:

The second command is nice and easy. We’ll be using ‘lshw’, a command that simply ‘lists hardware’. It’s a handy command and we should do an entire article on it – and likely will. But, it’s really simple:

Yeah, the ‘lshw’ command requires sudo to gather all the relevant information. There are other tools that don’t require sudo, but this one does. We use it because it’s a pretty standard tool in all the major Linux distros. It’s one of those universal things.

Closure:

There you have it. You have a couple of ways to show the graphics card information in the terminal…

And, son of a biscuit eater… I just noticed I already have an article on this subject. It’s a wee bit different, so I’m just gonna run with this one. Screw it… After this many articles, there’s bound to be some overlap.

Oh well… Oops and all that. I don’t really have time/motivation to delete this one and write a new one.

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Check Your Frames Per Second (FPS) From The Terminal

Today’s article will be a nice and quick article, where I show you how to check your frames per second (FPS) from the terminal. I promise, it’ll be really simple. Do, please, read on! It’ll be a quick and easy affair!

Amusingly, this was just mentioned at a forum I frequent. At the same time, it was in my notes as an article to cover sometime soon – on a day when I wanted a quick article. Today is a good day for a quick article because I’ve been having some connectivity issues all day.

So… Well, let’s discuss frames per second…

The frames per second is how fast you can show individual frames (individual images) on your screen. This is a function of hardware. Your frame rate is going to be dependent on things like your graphics card (or onboard graphics) and your monitor.

Some frame rates are really fast, others are consistently ‘good enough’ – at least for my needs. I am a simple man that doesn’t game or do anything that’s all that ‘graphics intensive’. For me, a simple on-board GPU and a bog standard LCD monitor is good enough. As of now, I don’t need things like 4k or 8k. Heck, I just use two smaller (30″) monitors and call it good.

But, gamers are obsessed with things like frame rate. They want the most frames per second they can eek out of their machines, and they want it to perform at that rate while the rest of the computer is under heavy load. Don’t complain, those gamers help drive the tech to continued improvement!

Well, this is just a quick way to find your FPS with the terminal. It’s not fancy and it’s not testing the graphics under load.

Check Your Frames Per Second:

As the title suggests, you’re gonna need the terminal open. So many of these articles require an open terminal, so many of you will already know how to do this. For the rest, just press CTRL + ALT + T and your default terminal should open.

With your terminal open, we’ll be using glxgears which should be installed by default in any major distro. If it’s not installed, just use your package manager to find and install it. In it’s basic form, you just call the command with:

If you want to specify which monitor you are using to test your frames per second, should you be using multiple monitors, you can run this command:

If you want to run glxgears and see the render information:

Finally, and I can’t get this to work on any of three devices, you can run it in stereo mode – which should display the test screen twice. It’s like so:

The output, that is your frames per second, will be displayed in the terminal itself. If you want to exit the program, you can close the window it opened or you can press CTRL + C

Of course, you can see the same thing I just showed you by running ‘man glxgears‘ in the terminal. It’s not a complicated program, but it will let you check your frames per second.

Closure:

There you have it, a nice and simple article. This time we’ve talked about how to check your frames per second in the terminal, which is kinda neat. There’s just so many things you can do in the terminal. It’s not always complicated. A lot of what you can do is pretty simple.

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How To: Show Your Hard Drive Specifications In The Terminal

In today’s article, we’re going to explore one way that you can show your hard drive hard drive specifications in the terminal. There’s nothing too challenging in this article, so even new people can follow along.

To be clear, I’m using the phrase ‘hard drive’. In this instance, I’m speaking both of mechanical hard drives (HDD) and solid state drives (SSD). I could probably come up with something better, but we’ll just stick with ‘hard drive’.

You may want to know your hard drive specifications to ensure you got what you paid for. You might also want to know what features it supports – and how long at least one of those features is expected to take. For instance, there’s a secure erase feature on many drives and this takes time. The command we’ll be using may tell you how much time it will take to securely erase the disk.

We’ll be showing the hard drive specifications in the terminal and the biggest tool we’ll be using is ‘hdparm’. It does what it says on the tin and describes itself like:

hdparm – get/set SATA/IDE device parameters

You should find hdparm installed and shouldn’t need to install anything. If you want confirmation that hdparm is installed, run:

You’ll find that there’s a lot to learn about hdparm, but don’t worry about that. You can check the manual if you want:

See also:

Check Disk Speed In The Terminal

So then, let’s just jump into the article…

Show Your Hard Drive Specifications:

As the title suggests, we’ll be using the terminal for this exercise. Open you terminal now. 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 now open, let’s find your disk drives with the following command.

Your drive should look something like this:

lsblk output
You’re looking on the left, at the base directory – such as ‘sda’ or ‘sdb’.

At this point, you want to note the base – the parent disk drive. In the above image, you see two of them. You see both ‘sda’ and ‘sdb’. Your results can be wildly different, but that’s the information you need.

Now it’s time to show the hard drive specifications. To do that, you’ll want to use a command that looks a lot like this:

An example of that command would look like:

The output is pretty verbose and you can learn a great deal about your hard drive specifications by using the hdparm command. As suggested above, don’t be afraid to run man hdparm to learn more because hdparm is a rather robust application..

Closure:

There you have it, you have another article! This time, you’ll have learned a bit about one way to show your hard drive specifications in the Linux terminal. Pretty sweet! So far we’ve been able to maintain that ‘every other day’ schedule.

Anyhow, please don’t frivolously click ads on the site. Google’s just taking the clicks away and is probably taking away some legitimate clicks while doing so. That’s not helpful! I appreciate it, I appreciate that you’ve whitelisted the site, but Google’s convinced I have invalid traffic and there’s not much I can do about it.

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