Category: Tips

A Little About The ‘lscpu’ Command

In today’s article we’re going to do what the title says, we’re going to learn a little about the ‘lscpu’ command. We’ll just touch the ways you’re likely to use ‘lscpu’ and that’s it. Then again, there’s not much more to it than that, so it’s going to be easy enough for a new Linux user to understand. You’re invited to read on…

As mentioned in the last article, and in the article before that, I’m going to take some time to cover some of the basic commands. However, I’m going to try to intersperse them, that is mix them up a bit, so that it’s not too boring for myself and my regular readers who are beyond this level.

The first of these articles was:

A Little About The ‘lsusb’ Command.

This article will cover ‘lscpu’. If it’s not obvious, this command will list information about your CPU. In fact, the man page describes ‘lscpu’ like:

lscpu – display information about the CPU architecture

And, sure enough, that’s the information we’re after in this article.

Of course, this is another command that gets run in the terminal. It’s an application that comes with ‘util-linux’ and is something you shouldn’t need to install. You should be able to use the ‘lscpu’ command without installing anything. So, there’s that…

Rather than drag the intro out, let’s just jump into it…

About The ‘lscpu’ Command:

As I mentioned in the intro, ‘lscpu’ is a terminal command. Of course, this means you need an open terminal. You should open one now. If you don’t know how to open your terminal, just press CTRL + ALT + T and your default terminal should open.

With your terminal now open, simply run the ‘lscpu’ command:

Tada! You have all the information you really need to know about your CPU – and quite a bit more information. So, let’s see what else we can do with the ‘lscpu’ command.

Let’s say you want some extended information. You can go about that with the -e flag. That’s easy enough to do, a simple command. It looks like this:

The outcome from that command would probably look a bit like:

the output of lscpu
As you can see, this CPU isn’t anything all that fancy. It’s effective and efficient!

As you can see, there’s nothing too fancy there.

You can actually select the fields you want to output from that command. For example, you can see the CPU and the CORE fields like this:

The only other way you’re going to use ‘lscpu’ is likely to be with grep. For example, if you want to know what architecture your CPU supports, you can run this command:

There’s more to ‘lscpu’, but you’re not likely to really need it for anything. If you do need more from ‘lscpu’, you just check the man page like so:

The man page should help you with anything more than what’s covered in this article. There’s not all that much more that’s useful, we’ve at least examined the ‘lscpu’ command.

Closure:

Yup, there’s another article. This article does what it attempted to do – which is share the most useful ways to use the ‘lscpu’. If you find yourself in a position where you need fairly detailed CPU commands, then ‘lscpu’ is the command you’re looking for.

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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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How To: Access Tor While Using T-Mobile

Today’s article is going to be a fairly trivial article, one aimed at specific people, where you’ll learn how to access Tor while using T-Mobile. This article might be easy enough for a new user, so there’s that. Even if you’re not using T-Mobile, if your access to Tor is blocked, this article might get you sorted;

Where to begin?

Well, Tor stands for ‘The Onion Project’, which is a way to browse the internet in a more anonymous fashion. If you’re unfamiliar with Tor, it’s easiest if you just read the Tor history page.

Basically speaking, the Tor browser is a more secure way to access the Onion network. It’s a way to stay fairly anonymous online, but nothing is completely secure – so keep that in mind. You use the Tor browser (based on Firefox) to browse dark web sites with .onion domain names and have a good chance at anonymity if you stay within the .onion network.

I’ve lately used a phone as a mobile hotspot. The provider is T-Mobile. For reasons known only to them, T-Mobile blocks Tor, preventing it from connecting. At the same time…

There are some underground ‘hacker’ forums that I like to monitor. As T-Mobile is blocking access to that site, I had to figure out how to access Tor while using T-Mobile. It took a few tries, but I have now figured it out. I write this article to save you some time and me some memory…

Access Tor While Using T-Mobile:

First, you’re going to need the Tor browser (though you could manually mess around with connecting and then use another browser). You can download the Tor project browser here. If you’re unfamiliar and using Linux, you don’t actually install the Tor browser (unless you want to), you just extract it and use the shortcuts the archive includes. However, the Tor browser project is where I’d go and I’d adhere to their defaults.

Now, try as hard as you want to connect…

T-Mobile isn’t going to allow you to connect and access Tor. If you follow these directions, you probably violate T-Mobile’s ToS, you can work around it. In my case, I used NordVPN – but any free proxy that lets you set the connection manually will let you do the same. To be clear, I am using NordVPN as a proxy.

Open the hamburger menu. Select the Support option. When you open Settings, the Tor settings section should be the first section  you see. That’s good, it will save a lot of time. All you need to do is configure your VPN to work like a proxy. That’s pretty easy. So is finding a free proxy service.

I tried the bridge options and none of those worked. So, instead I decided to use the VPN option. Sure enough, that worked! So, find a free proxy (or VPN) that you can configure manually, You should check your paid VPN settings as they should let you manually configure it like a proxy. You can also try any one of the zillion free proxy lists out there.

Try this:

change the settings and use your VPN like a proxy.
Check your VPN provider for a ‘proxy’ setting and use that.

Be sure to set the proxy type correctly. If your VPN is even a little modern, SOCKS 5 is likely to be what you want. You should end up with something that looks like this:

Tor browser connected with T-Mobile
You can indeed use Tor with T-Mobile. You can access Tor while using T-Mobile.

Also, you may need to reload Tor or grab a new identity, and then just be patient. Wait a minute to access Tor while using T-Mobile, as it can be a little slow. Adding the proxy means another layer, so it can take a little while longer. Plus, Tor has never been known for speed.

Closure:

There you have it, but you’ll only find this useful if you are wanting to access Tor on T-Mobile. This should work the same regardless of what OS your using. This article should work for Windows users, actually. If you want to access Tor while using T-Mobile, just use a proxy.

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How To: Quickly Restart The Cinnamon Desktop Environment

Today’s article is going to be a pretty quick and easy article, where you learn how to quickly restart the Cinnamon desktop environment. It shouldn’t be a very long article, and I’d say it’s easy enough for a beginner to process. So, if you’re interested in restarting the Cinnamon DE, read on!

Obviously, this will only apply to those folks who are using the Cinnamon desktop environment. Well, no… I do believe it also works in the GNOME desktop environment. As I understand that it’s a holdover from GNOME, which is what Cinnamon is based on. Alas, I don’t have anything running GNOME right here in front of me, so I’m not going to test that.

On the off-chance that you don’t know what desktop environment you’re using, that’s easy enough to learn. You can just read this article:

How To: Determine Your Desktop Environment

If you want to skip reading that, just open the terminal and run the following command:

The output of that command will tell you what desktop environment you’re using. If the result is ‘cinnamon’, then this article applies to you! 

Anyhow, if you leave your computer on for a long time, you might find that Cinnamon is eating up a bunch of RAM and CPU. You can clear that out by logging out or rebooting, but there’s a much easier way to restart the Cinnamon desktop environment. This article will show you how.

Restart The Cinnamon Desktop Environment:

This time around, you don’t even need to open a terminal!

With your keyboard, press ALT + F2 and you should have a new window open up on your screen. It looks like this:

alt + f2 popup allowing you to run commands
If you’ve never pressed this key combination before, this may be new to you. Neat!

Now, all you need to do to restart the Cinnamon desktop environment is press the letter R and then press the ENTER key.

That alone, that little shortcut, will restart your Cinnamon desktop environment, meaning it may free up some RAM and lower the amount of CPU that the desktop environment is using.

Bonus:

You can actually run other commands from there. I don’t know all of them, or at least I don’t know if I know all of them. I’ve been unable to find an exhaustive list and I only know of a few shortcuts you can use in this run screen.

There’s a shortcut, like ‘rt’ that will reload your theme (useful for theme creators). It just reloads the theme, and doesn’t actually restart Cinnamon, though it may kinda look similar.

This won’t apply to too many of my users, as my readers are generally beginners, but you can also enter ‘lg’ into the shortcut window.

If you were using GNOME instead of Cinnamon, it’ll open up “looking glass”, the GNOME debugger.

If you’re using Cinnamon, it opens up Melange – the Cinnamon debugger. Debuggers can be useful if you need it and know what you’re doing with it.

The goodness doesn’t stop there!

If you want, you can put ‘firefox’, ‘gedit’, ‘leafpad’ or other applications in there. So long as those applications exist in /usr/bin, they should load just fine from this run screen. You can use this shortcut to open pretty much any application that has been installed via the normal means. 

If you want to load something that’s not installed from this screen, you can do that too. You just need to enter the path to the application you want to open. Something like, ~/Downloads/LibreWolf.AppImage will work, according to my testing.

Closure:

There you have it! You’ve learned how to use a hidden run menu to restart the Cinnamon desktop environment. On top of that, you’ve learned that it can be useful for all sorts of other tasks. It’s a pretty handy shortcut, one you can open without taking your hands off the keyboard to use a mouse. That right there is quite a bonus in and of itself!

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Disable WiFi From The Terminal

In today’s article, we’re going to learn how to disable WiFi from the terminal. It’s going to be a simple enough article, with just a few commands to learn. Read on, my dear readers! There’s information to share!

This is certainly a tool that new Linux users could use, you just need to remember to turn WiFi back on when/if you need wireless access again. So, read on, my dear readers, as we venture into a bit of controlling networking with the Linux terminal.

This will will show you how to completely disable WiFi, rendering you unable to connect to any wireless network. There are those folks who will see this as a security measure, as they distrust wireless connections. There are others who may view this as a battery saving measure, as you no longer will have the wireless radio polling for connections or anything like that.

The tool we’ll be using for this is ‘nmcli’. You can do a lot with this command, but the man page describes ‘nmcli’ as this:

nmcli – command-line tool for controlling NetworkManager

And, if you dig a bit deeper, you’ll see that there’s a man page for ‘NetworkManager’. This is described as:

NetworkManager – network management daemon

So, as you can see, we’re gonna be dealing with the network. That’s what I told you in the title and the introductory paragraph! See? We take this seriously! So very, very seriously!

Disable WiFi From The Terminal:

Yup. You read that right. It’s another article that requires an open terminal, so you should open a 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 learn how to disable WiFi from the terminal itself. So, to disable WiFi, your command would look like:

Next, of course, we’ll learn to turn it back on again. That command looks like:

If you have other radios, such as a mobile/cellular network, you can actually enable and disable all the radios with just one command:

And to turn all the radios back on again:

And there you have it.. You can disable WiFi from the terminal. If you want to know more about ‘nmcli’ (and it’s a bit of a robust command), it’s just:

You can also check the ‘NetworkManager’ man page with:

Closure:

There it is! It’s another article! This one does what the title says it’s going to do – it shows you how to disable WiFi from the terminal. There’s more to ‘nmcli’ and ‘networkmanager’ so maybe we’ll have another article covering some other options? It could happen!

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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