Learn About Your Wireless Connection

Many of us rely on a wireless connection for our connectivity and this is for those who want to learn about your wireless connection. It should be a relatively simple article. Though, if you do not use wireless internet this won’t be very interesting.

Today’s article about your wireless connection will show you how to learn things like the quality of your connection, the transmission power, the frequency you’re using, and other sundry wireless bits. It’s a bit technical, and we will learn about your wireless connection in the terminal, but it’s all good information and not very complicated.

The tools we’ll be using should be installed in all current major distros. For example, we won’t use ifconfig because it is deprecated. We’ll be using the ip command instead. We’ll also be using iwconfig in this article. You shouldn’t need to install anything for this article. All the tools you need should be installed by default.

Side note: The site sure does load fast without ads! I’ll be finding a new ad provider soon enough, I just haven’t done so yet. I may appeal to Google. We shall see, but the site sure is fast! Alas, it generates no income to offset my expenses. So, we will have ads again. It’s going to happen.

As for the tools we’ll be using…

The IP Command:

The first tool we’ll use will be the ip command. As I mentioned above, the ifconfig tool has been deprecated. It is no longer supported and we’ve moved on to bigger and better things. Most major distros will have made this change. For a bit of completeness sake, I’ll include details for the old way.

You can verify that the ip command is available with this command:

If you check the man page, with man ip command, you’ll see that this is the correct tool for the job. The job is what was indicated in the article’s title. Anyhow, the ip command is described like this:

ip – show / manipulate routing, network devices, interfaces and tunnels

We’ll be using the command to identify the name of your wireless connection. It’s easy enough and you can easily follow along.

The IWCONFIG Command:

The iwconfig command is how we’ll be gathering information about your wireless connection. You should find that you don’t have to install anything for this. If you’re using a major distro that’s modern, you’ll almost certainly have iwconfig available. You can confirm that iwconfig is available with this command:

Just like we did above, you can run the man iwconfig command to see that this is the tool for the job. The output should include the following:

In our case, we won’t be doing any configuration – but we will be using this command to learn about the wireless connection. It’s a handy tool, but we’ll just be using it to gather data.

So, let’s get into the actual article itself…

Learn About Your Wireless Connection:

I mentioned above that this is something you do in the terminal. You probably know how to open your terminal by now. If not, you can usually press CTRL + ALT + T to open up your default terminal.

With your terminal now open, you can check your network connections. The purpose of this command is to learn which of your connection names is the correct one for your wireless connection.

If you’re using an older system, and some modern systems still contain the command, you can use the deprecated ifconfig like so:

Scroll through that data to find your wireless connection. It’ll begin with a W. It used to have a nice simple name by default, but times have changed. In my case, it looks like this:

In this case, you can see that the name of my wireless device is wlxe4beed0e5f5c. Unless you’ve renamed them, your wireless connection should start with a W and should be the only connection that starts with a W.

With that information in hand, you’ll next want to learn about your wireless connection with the iwconfig command. The syntax is quite simple:

So, in my case, the command would look like this:

The output would look like this (in my case):

From there, you can see the access point you’re connected to. You can find out the bit rate, frequency, and power management status of the device, and much more. See? Pretty easy.

HINT: If you don’t want all that information, you can always pipe it through grep. That’s pretty simple:

An example output would be:

This is a quick and easy way to learn about your wireless connection. It’s something that’s not too difficult and something everyone can practice to get a little bit more comfortable working in the Linux terminal.

Closure:

Someone asked if I was running out of ideas for articles. I do not believe I am. There’s just so much to write about and so many things that are worth covering. Today we’re learning about your wireless connection. Tomorrow we’ll be on to something else. And that’s okay… 

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.

Set Individual Flatpaks Permissions With Flatseal

This will be an article about Flatpaks permissions and how you can set said Flatpaks permissions with Flatseal. There’s a good chance that this will be a relatively short article, which is nice.

BEFORE YOU BEGIN:

I covered what a Flatpak is and some other bits of information. Read this:

Install Flatpaks In Lubuntu

That will give you an overview and enough information to get started. The only thing that will change is how you enable Flatpak and the Flathub repository. The method you use to do that will be different unless you’re using a distro that relies on the apt package manager.

What Is Flatpak:

I wrote this information out already, but some of you will not bother clicking immediately so I’ll mention that a Flatpak is an application that runs with its own dependencies and is sandboxed from the rest of the system.

The important part of this is that the developers who packaged the Flatpak set the permissions for that application. For example, their application may need access to the network. Their application may need access to storage media. The Flatpak may need to be able to access the sound manager so that you can hear things output by the application.

Well, you can adjust those permissions. If you want to grant additional access, you can do that. If you don’t need certain features, you can deny access to those resources. It’s up to you.

The developer shipped the Flatpak with a set of permissions. There are also default permissions that you can edit. If you want to do something like disallow all Flatpak access to the network,  you could do that. You can also adjust these permissions on a per-application basis.

Which leads us to this…

Set Flatpaks permissions with Flatseal:

If you want to manage Flatpaks permissions with Flatseal, you can start (and pretty much close this page) with the following link:

Flatseal on Flathub

The installation instructions will be available on that page. Alternatively, if you’ve already enabled Flatpaks (see the earlier link in this article) you can just press CTRL + ALT + T to open your terminal and enter the following command:

After you enter that into your terminal, you’ll press the Y button on your keyboard a couple of times to confirm that you wish to install.

With that said and done, you can then open your application menu, find Flatseal, and open the application. I’ll give you a screenshot, but there’s just so much more to this application that I can’t cover it. It’s fairly self-explanatory and you should be able to figure it out – but there are many options. 

Flatseal is used to adjust the permissions of a Flatpak.
That’s just the tip of the iceberg. Scroll down and there are maybe 50 options. Good luck!

There are just too many options for me to cover. The best way for you to learn how to use Flatseal is to simply install Flatseal and examine the options. If you have any questions about those options, reach out and I may be able to help. Otherwise, you can figure this out on your own.

I have faith in you. You can figure this one out!

Closure:

Well, you can now adjust Flatpaks permissions with Flatseal. I’m never quite sure how to pluralize or make it possessive, but I did my best. We’ll have to see how the final article does.

Anyhow, I told you this should be a fairly short article. It’s not designated as a short article because it’s a bit long for that and you have to read a bunch of other stuff if you want to use this as your starting point. If I could assume you had Flatpaks already enabled, this could have been a short article. I’ll make no such assumptions.

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.

So, My AdSense Account Has Been Disabled

This will be a short article about monetizing the site’s content with AdSense. Google, in its infinite wisdom, has decided to cancel my account and will, presumably, keep any funds not yet paid.

The reason they did this was for invalid traffic.

In short, that means people were clicking the ads without actually being interested in the ads. They were clicking them fairly often lately and I noticed the uptick in my earnings. That was nice. 

I didn’t know that it’s a person (or several) who has been clicking ads to help the site along. For Google to have done this, it has to have been fairly drastic and frequent. 

I’ll look for some tech to resolve this and examine other options. We’ll see how that goes and I’ll let folks know what choices I make.

The reality is, that I can afford to keep the site going without ads. However, being rewarded for my effort and having some funds to offset my costs was pretty nice.

People don’t donate often. That’s okay. The total donations have been less than $50 since day one. I can’t count on that to offset the costs and that does nothing for my time – and, man, have I invested my time.

The site isn’t going anywhere. The ads didn’t pay that much. There are other forms of advertising. I may start accepting sponsored posts with some subjects AdSense wouldn’t allow but are (in my opinion) otherwise harmless.

The reality is that I don’t know what I’ll do, but I will make changes. The site gets plenty of traffic, so it’s eligible for some ad programs. I’ll do some research and see where we are at the end of the day.

It has never been about the money. If it was, that was a losing proposition. It’s just nice to have some ad revenue to offset expenses. If you’re looking to place ads, there’s a sponsorship link above. We’ll see what I accept for posts going forward.

When it is resolved, I do ask that you not click ads just to help me out. The sentiment is nice, but ads are for advertisers and they only want to pay for clicks that come from people legitimately interested in their product. Keep that in mind and only click on ads that interest you. Thanks!

Test Your Storage Drive’s Read Speed

One of the most frequent things you’ll do is read data from disk, so why not test your storage drive’s read speed? In this article, we’ll use an application we’ve used before. This shouldn’t be a very complicated article.

We store data on drives, or disks if you prefer. Most of us don’t use disks as our main storage devices. We do use disks for backups or storing large amounts of data, but we largely use SSDs these days. Some of us even use NVMe M.2 SSDs to store our data. The latter is currently the quickest you’re likely to encounter as a consumer.

The old spinning platters we used (though we’ve used lots of forms of magnetic storage) are typically referred to as HDDs (Hard Disk Drives). The SSDs (Solid State Drives) have no moving parts and are much faster. The NVMe M.2 SSDs are faster still.

If you’re suffering from some bottleneck, you might want to diagnose that. You might just be curious. It is also possible that you just purchased new hardware and want to see if the storage device reaches the advertised speed.

The tool we’ll be using is hdparm. This works fine with USB thumb drives, HDDs, regular SSDs, and even NVMe SSDs. It’s a complex application with a lot of options. I’ve covered some features before.

How To: Show Your Hard Drive Specifications In The Terminal

So then, let’s learn about this hdparm…

hdparm:

It should be noted that this hdparm application should be installed by default. It should also be mentioned that hdparm is a terminal-based application. You can verify that hdparm is installed with the following command:

If you then check the man page (with man hdparm) you’ll see that hdparm is described quite nicely like this:

hdparm – get/set SATA/IDE device parameters

If hdparm is not installed, you can surely find it in your package manager. 

As you can see, hdparm is the right tool for the job assuming you want to test your storage drive’s read speed. It’s also the right tool for a bunch of other jobs, but we’ll just be covering the read speed today.

Test Your Storage Drive’s Read Speed:

As I mentioned above, this hdparm application is something you use in your terminal. I suspect my regular readers will have guessed that. If you’re new to the terminal, more often than not you can open your default terminal by pressing CTRL + ALT + T.

With your terminal open, let’s identify your storage drives with this command:

You’re interested in the bits that start with /dev/<drive_ID> as those are the drives you’ll be able to test. 

NOTE: You should run these tests several times and average them, and you should do so while the system is otherwise idle. That will give you the peak results.

We’re interested in two flags, as they represent two tests. The -t flag tests the read cached. The -T flag tests the drive’s buffered read timings. You’ll often find the first test is fairly similar throughout the different drives and that the cached test shows the most differences. If those two terms, cached and buffered, confuse you, here’s a link about the differences between cache and buffer as far as the hdparm application goes.

You’ll need elevated permissions for this, so the command looks like this:

Or, as an example for many of you, the command might look like this:

That command will test both the cached read speed and the buffered read speed. These tests are important because you’re using a smart operating system that puts things into the cache and buffer that are likely to be read from the drive. So, the command listed will test both. You can split them up of course.

I decided to get you some examples:

Some Quick Read Speed Tests:

This is the internal SSD on a desktop:

Next is a USB 2.0 device plugged into that desktop:

Then we have an external HDD plugged into a USB 2.0 port on that desktop:

For comparison, this is an NVMe M.2 SSD:

As you can see, the internal SSD is quite fast. The thumb drive is the next quickest. This is followed by the external drive that’s just a spinning platter drive. 

Then, of course, you can see that the NVMe M.2 SSD is so much faster. That’s not even the fastest SSD out there. There are faster NVMe M.2 SSDs that don’t cost a lot of money. The prices have come down these days. You can even get a PCIe card that lets you mount an NVMe M.2 SSD if your motherboard doesn’t already support it.

Closure:

Should you want to get some drive benchmarks, you can certainly use hdparm to test your storage drive’s read speed. This isn’t something complicated and most anyone can figure it out. All you need to do is follow the directions carefully and in order. I do try to explain things as I go along.

There’s a lot more to the hdparm application. I encourage you to check the man page. There are probably another half-dozen articles that can be written about hdparm, so you’ll likely see this application again in the future. I doubt I’ll do another one too soon, as I like to space things out and not get too repetitive. 

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.

Install Flatpaks In Lubuntu

This shouldn’t be a very long article and will apply to other distros, but this is how you install Flatpaks in Lubuntu. This seems like a good article to write as it’s something tucked into my notes and something I’ve not written about before.

This article applies to Lubuntu. It may apply to other distros, especially those in the Lubuntu family. In some cases, such as Linux Mint, recent versions come with Flatpak support. In those cases, you don’t need to do anything special, you can start using Flatpaks as soon as you’d like.

What Are Flatpaks:

Flatpak is a utility for software deployment. It was once known as xdg-app but has used the Flatpak name for going on a decade. This is not something new, even though it has recently grown in popularity. They’re pretty handy.

The thing that makes Flatpaks special is that they run in a sandbox. That means they don’t interact with other software on your system, they run in their own isolated memory space. This is good for security.

They’re also good for easy installation. Not only do they run in an isolated environment, they are self-contained. With Flatpak being what it is, you don’t have to worry about dependencies.

If a Flatpak does need to integrate with the system, this will be set by the developer. The advanced user can change those permissions, though that may cause breakage should you restrict the access levels.

There’s also a central repository that you can use. While you can get a Flatpak from anywhere, and you can add your own repositories, the most common use will be from a central repository which does things like providing updates to the packaged software. 

This is good for developers who want to distribute their software while not having to do so for the various package managers. Rather than a .deb or .rpm version, they can upload and update a Flatpak that’s stored in a centralized repository.

Pretty neat!

Install Flatpaks In Lubuntu:

For the sake of this article, Flatpak is the software type and the delivery mechanism, while Flatpaks are the applications installed via Flatpak. Make sense? I hope so because that’s what I’ve got.

I should probably have mentioned that earlier in the article…

Anyhow, to install Flatpak you’ll need an open terminal. As you’re using Lubuntu, you can open your default terminal by pressing CTRL + ALT + T on your keyboard.

With your terminal now open, let’s install Flatpak so that you can install all the Flatpaks your heart desires. To do that, run this command to install Flatpak:

That will install Flatpak, but you will then want to enable the Flatpak repository. That’s another easy command that you can cut and paste:

Next, you’ll need to reboot. Yes, this one should have a reboot to work properly. Run this command in the terminal:

That’s all you need to do.

Installing Flatpaks:

Now you have enabled Flatpak and you’ve added the default Flatpak repository. You can head to the centralized repository and start browsing for interesting software. You do that here:

Flathub, the Flatpak Repository

I’ll give you an example, to make it easier…

Let’s say you want to install ONLYOFFICE as a Flatpak.

Well, you browse/search for it and end up at the ONLYOFFICE repo page.

Once you’re there, you’ll see an “Install” option in the upper right section of the page. There’s a down-arrow next to it, which is the easiest method. Click that and run the command prompt in your terminal.

In this case, that command prompt would be:

You can then run the application with this command:

No, you shouldn’t need to run the program through the terminal. Because you rebooted, added Flatpaks should appear in your application menu in the appropriate category section. 

Also, it’s a bit more of an interactive process when you’re installing Flatpaks through the terminal. You’ll be given a few options along the way, though I just accept the defaults (by pressing the Y key) and call it good.

You’ll also notice that the applications are much larger. If you have slower internet, you’ll notice this. This is because the Flatpaks are isolated and come with the required dependencies. Because of this, the packages are quite a bit larger.

Once in a while, I’ve noticed that the application won’t appear until a reboot happens. If you run the terminal command once, that seems to help it, and then appears in the application menu. It’s not perfect, at least not here, but it’s definitely ‘good enough’ and it’s a great way to get sandboxed software that doesn’t require hunting around for dependencies.

Closure:

So, that’s how you install Flatpaks in Lubuntu. It’s also probably how you install Flatpaks in ElementaryOS, Kubuntu, Xubuntu, etc… However, if you’re installing Flatpaks in Ubuntu there’s an extra step you can take that lets you integrate Flatpaks better with the GNOME desktop environment.

If you’re using Ubuntu, you can add this command before the reboot step:

I believe that will add Flatpaks to your regular software store, that is the GUI one where you’d go to add software. I’m not sure because I don’t use Ubuntu, but that’s what the command looks like it will do. I’d normally not share any code I haven’t used myself, but I took the command from Flatpak’s site, which makes me think it’s correct.

Anyhow, Flatpaks are easy to install and run more securely. If your OS changes underneath, this won’t matter. The software comes with the appropriate dependencies. Once you’re more familiar with the software, you can change the permissions if you want. I’ve yet to find a single reason why I’d want to modify the permissions – but it’s possible.

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.

Linux Tips
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.