Show Your Filesystem In The Linux Terminal

Today is going to be a good day if you have decided that you want to show your filesystem in the Linux terminal. If that’s not what you want to do, this might not be the article for you! If it is what you want to do, read on!

I’m going to try to keep this fairly short. There are two commands that I have available to help you show your filesystem in the Linux terminal. There are surely other ways to do so, but I’ll just cover two different ways.

Both of them will be quite simple…

These two commands should be fairly standard. They should work in your distro, regardless of which distro you’ve chosen. There’s nothing special about them.

What do I mean when I say ‘show your filesystem in the Linux terminal’? I mean you can see, and identify, your various drives and their partitions. You can also learn a bit more information about them, but the general idea is that you can see and learn about them in the terminal.

Like I said, this won’t be fairly complicated. It will involve the terminal.

Show Your Filesystem In The Linux Terminal:

Yes, I said the terminal. You will need an open terminal. If you want to open your default terminal, you can usually just press CTRL + ALT + T. That will open your default terminal more often than not. Otherwise, open it from your terminal.

Now, to get to the point… I’m going to show you a couple of commands that you can use to show your filesystem in the Linux terminal. 

Ready?

lsblk:

The first tool we’ll use is lsblk. This is installed by default on any major distro and you won’t need to install anything. If you check the man page, you’ll see that lsblk is described like this:

lsblk – list block devices

That command sounds useful. Block devices are disks, drives, partitions, and the like. So, you can just run that command in the terminal. It looks like this:

The output is easy enough to understand. It might look something like this:

That’s with a bunch of junk still plugged in from a previous article. You can see that the output is easy enough to understand.

df:

The next command we’re going to use is the ‘df’ command. Again, you shouldn’t need to install anything to use the df command. This is something that should already be installed and if you want to use it to show your filesystem type in the Linux terminal, it’s quite easy.

First, you should check the man page. If you do, you’ll see that df is described as:

df – report file system disk space usage

Once again, that sounds like a fine tool for learning about your filesystem. You’ll want two flags. The first flag is -T and will show you the file system type. The second flag is -h and that means it’ll spit the output in human-readable form. An example of that command would look like:

An example output would look like this:

Again, that’s nice and easy to understand. If you want to show your filesystem information, these commands are easily memorized.

You’ll notice that both output is quite similar, as it should be. There are only so many filesystems available in the distro I used to write this. This information can be quite a bit more complicated if you’re running it against a NAS with lots of different storage options, but it’s generally easy enough to understand.

Closure:

There you go… This isn’t even a very long article – because it doesn’t need to be. I wanted to show you how to show your filesystem information in the Linux terminal. None of these commands are all that difficult to use and remember. You can also get some useful information from the mount | grep "^/dev" command, so keep that in mind along with the commands shown in this article.

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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List Installed Software In Lubuntu

There may come a point in your Linux journey where you must list the installed software in Lubuntu. This is easily done and I will show you a couple of quick ways to get this list in the terminal. So, if you want to list installed software in Lubuntu, this is the article for you!

I’m writing this article because it’s quick and easy. I won’t make this article as long as I’ve made recent articles. We’re just going to get to the point, more or less. I will show you a couple of different ways, each with its own merits. You can decide which way works for you.

The article headline and related material reference Lubuntu. That’s because I’m using Lubuntu when I write this article. I am a Lubuntu member, after all. It makes sense that I’d be using Lubuntu!

Plus, it’s a weekend. I’ve formalized the idea that articles written during weekends will be easier. I have a life outside of writing articles and doing other things to help the Linux community. (It’s amazing, but it’s true!)

However, you can use these commands on anything that uses dpkg or apt. That means you can use these commands on Debian, Linux Mint, Ubuntu, and myriad other distros that use .deb files as their software packages. These commands are fairly universal across those distros and you shouldn’t have any issue running either of them on any of those machines.

Caveat:

The following commands will not show you Snap packages or flatpak packages. Software installed by those means does not show up in these commands. Only software installed with dpkg/apt (which includes all .deb packages even if you used a GUI installation method) will be shown.

Fortunately, that’s not a problem.

To show flatpak applications:

To show Snap applications:

AppImages aren’t really installed and I can find no way to list those that make sense. Sure, we could use the find command and list any .appimage file, but that won’t tell us if you use it. We’ll just ignore those for the sake of simplicity and to stay within the realms of ‘reasonable’.

List Installed Software In Lubuntu:

In the opening paragraph, I mentioned that this was something you’d be doing in the terminal. That means you need an open terminal. As you’re using Lubuntu, you can just press CTRL + ALT + T and QTerminal should open right up.

With your terminal now open, the first command we’ll be using is dpkg. This will not show all the installed applications at the same time. This outputs a nicely formatted list. You can see the version of the software on the right. It’s easy to understand.

It will show you a page at a time and your arrow button lets you scroll down to see them all. To exit the list, you press the Q button on your keyboard. To list installed software in Lubuntu with dpkg, you simply run the following command:

The second command might be a little more useful, but it’s not formatted nearly as nicely. This time around, we’ll be using the apt command. If you don’t know, apt is basically a front end for dpkg. Now you know.

If you want to use apt to list installed software in Lubuntu, you would just run the following command:

That will spit out the entire list, though you could pipe it to the less command. To do that, try this command:

That will output the list a page at a time. Like the above dpkg command, if you want to exit the list, you just press the Q button on your keyboard.

This command is also useful to create a list of installed applications. Again, this won’t list Snaps or flatpaks, but it will list the traditionally installed applications. That means it’s pretty useful to create a list, especially if you want to recreate the system later. To do that, just run this command:

There you go, you now have a handy list of installed applications in Lubuntu! Pretty easy, isn’t it?

That’s all there is to it today. 

Closure:

Yeah, it’s a weekend. This article might just break 800 words, so it’s not nearly as long as many of my recent articles. This time around,  you’ve learned how to list installed software in Lubuntu. It wasn’t even that complicated and you’ve been given the choice between two commands. Just pick the one that works for you and commit it to memory. You’ll be golden and have taken one more step in your route of Linux learning.

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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Find The Last Filesystem Check

If you’ve been using Linux for any time, you may have done a filesystem check and today we’ll find out when you did the last filesystem check with the Linux terminal. This may seem a little complicated, at least at the start, but it should be relatively easy. New Linux users should be able to follow along as we try to make Linux more approachable.

Disks have corruption after a while. Given enough time and data, a filesystem check is likely. Fortunately, Linux has many tools that will help you verify the integrity of your data. These tools are generally installed by default, so we shouldn’t need to install any new tools in this tutorial.

The article will have been tested in Lubuntu. The directions in this article are going to work with Ubuntu, official Ubuntu flavors, Linux Mint, ElementaryOS, and many more distros. I’d say they’re fairly generic instructions and that all these tools will be installed by default in most major distros.

You need good data health. This isn’t about hardware health as much as you’d learn from S.M.A.R.T data, it’s about the integrity of your data. You might use the information from this article to decide to run an fdisk command or two. Of course, you might also be interested in one of my more popular articles:

Repair Your Linux Filesystem With a Live USB or DVD

What we’re going to do is find out when the last filesystem check. What you do with that information is up to you. 

We will be using some tools…

lsblk:

The first tool we’ll be using is one of the default Linux tools. The name of that tool is lsblk. You can verify that lsblk is installed with the following command:

The output should look similar to this:

If you run man lsblk in the terminal, you’ll find that it’s described as this:

lsblk – list block devices

We’ll be using this lsblk command to identify drive names. It’s not complicated and you’ll be able to follow along easily enough. I’m sure of it!

tune2fs:

We’ll also be using the tune2fs command in this exercise. As far as I can tell, tune2fs doesn’t have a formal version flag. If you run a typical version command against it, it does spit out the version but it also spits out some usage information. So, that will do for verifying that you do indeed have tune2fs installed. You can run this command:

The output will look weird, but it’ll confirm that tune2fs is installed. 

Of course, the man page describes tune2fs like this:

tune2fs – adjust tunable file system parameters on ext2/ext3/ext4 filesystems

While that might not seem useful, it is. We’ll be using it to get those system parameters to find out when you did the last system check. Trust me! It’ll come in handy.

We’ll also be using a pipe and grep, but we’ve used those many times before.

Find Your Last Filesystem Check:

If it’s not obvious, we’ll be using the terminal for this. So, press CTRL + ALT + T and let’s get this party started.

The first thing you do is you want to identify the name of the drive. Don’t blame me for calling it the name. That’s what the command outputs. That’s what I’m calling it. The command for this is nice and simple, just run this command:

I plugged a bunch of stuff in, so an example output might look like this:

Next, your command looks like this:

This isn’t always going to spit out the right information. If a drive isn’t an EXT* formatted partition/drive, it’s not going to spit out any useful information. There will be no information if you try to use it with your EFI partition, for example.

An example EFI command and output might be:

On the other hand, an example of a good output might be like this:

As you can see, that was checked just a couple of months ago.

Alternatively, as I plugged some rather random stuff into the USB ports, you might see something as old as this:

That’s been a minute or two since the last filesystem check.

If you’re using an NVMe M.2 SSD, this will still work:

So, it’s not all that difficult to find out when you did your last filesystem check.

Closure:

Careful observation may show you that the site has changed a little. There’s now a way to do sponsorship, seeing as I get asked so many times. Nobody ever follows through, but I have had some contact with a couple of agencies. You may start seeing sponsored content soon. Feel free to about sponsoring Linux-Tips if you want.

As for the article, it’s just another easy enough article. I hope I’ve distilled it down enough to make it approachable for even the newest Linux users. It may be good to check to see when you performed your last file system check. If you have data in cold storage, you may want to check that now and again and check your filesystem’s health once in a while. The goal is to prevent data loss through corruption and this should help with that.

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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Block A Specific Port In Linux Mint

If you’re using Linux Mint, you’ll find you have ufw already installed which means it’s easy to block a specific port in Linux Mint! I’ll explain how to do that in this article and do what I can to make it easy enough for a new Linux user to follow. If this interests you, read on!

You might want to block a port for all sorts of reasons. If you’re open to the public web via your router, you might find bots hammering at the default ports (such as 22 for SSH) trying to find the login credentials, even if none exist. This is unnecessary traffic and can cause the system to slow down if it’s overwhelmed with connection requests.

Also, Linux uses a lot of ports. There are a bunch that are reserved, for example. You can also designate your ports for many things. I’ve written articles about ports before, so here’s some light reading material:

How To: Check If A Specific Port Is Open
How To: Scan A Remote Host For Open Ports
Find Out What Process Is Listening On A Specific Port
Prevent Brute-Force SSH Attacks With fail2ban

About Ports:

Now, I think I’ll let an AI tell you what a port is in Linux.

A Linux port is a virtual concept that helps access different services within a network. A port is a 16-bit integer ranging from 0 to 65535 with no physical existence.

A port acts as a communication endpoint for identifying a given process or application on the Linux operating system. A port is a 16-bit (o to 65535) number that differentiates a single application from others on various end systems.

As the blurb says, these are virtual ports. They’re not like the physical ports on your router, or anything like that. They’re used for communication and sending traffic to a specific port is asking for traffic on that port. 

If you have nmap installed, you could run nmap localhost to find out which ports are open on your computer. You probably should run that command (you’ll need to install nmap with sudo apt install nmap before you can run this command in Linux Mint). If the port isn’t open, then you don’t need to block that specific port.

UFW:

Linux Mint comes with ‘ufw’ already installed. It is not enabled by default, however. It’s good that it comes installed, which means it’s almost ready for use and you only need to enable ufw for it to be of use. If you don’t know what ufw is, you can check the man page with man ufw to learn more. For simplicity’s sake, you’ll find that ufw is described as:

ufw – program for managing a netfilter firewall

We will be using ufw to block a specific port in Linux Mint. You’ll learn that ufw stands for “Uncomplicated Firewall” and is a frontend for iptables. You can do anything with iptables that you can with ufw, but ufw is much easier for a new Linux Mint user. It doesn’t need to be complicated, as you’ll see in this article.

Use UFW To Block A Specific Port In Linux Mint:

While there is a GUI front-end for ufw, we won’t be using that. Instead, we’ll just use the installed terminal and ufw. As you’re using Linux Mint, you can open your default terminal by pressing CTRL + ALT + T.

With your terminal now open, we first need to enable ufw because ufw is not enabled by default. To enable ufw, run the following command:

That will enable ufw on system startup. That command should output something that looks like this:

You can later disable ufw if you find you no longer wish to use it. That command would look like this:

Now, to block a specific port in Linux Mint with ufw, the syntax would be easy enough to figure out. It just looks like this:

If you want to block the default SSH port (port 22) then you can do that like so:

If you change your mind at a later date, the command to undo this would be:

All you need to do is remember ‘deny’ and ‘allow’ and that ufw commands require elevated permissions which means you need to use sudo. If you can remember that, you can block and unblock specific ports in Linux Mint!

Closure:

Yes, this article is about blocking a specific port in Linux Mint with the ufw command, but it applies to many other distros. I just happened to be using Linux Mint when I wrote the article and didn’t want to test on other systems before smashing the schedule button. So, I wrote it specifically for Linux Mint. This will likely be an accurate tutorial for Ubuntu, the official Ubuntu flavors, other Ubuntu derivatives, and maybe Debian. I’m not sure about Debian.

And now you know…

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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How To: Enable NTP In Linux

Time is very important to the Linux operating system so keeping accurate time is important, which is why we want to enable NTP in Linux. This won’t be a major article and it should be simple enough to follow along. It’s pretty easy to enable NTP in Linux.

If you don’t know, NTP stands for Network Time Protocol. This allows your computer to connect to a networked device that tells your computer the accurate time and then syncs your computer’s clock with that accurate time.

This networked time server is usually just on the public web, but you could do things like run your own NTP server with a GPS device. (GPS uses really, really, really accurate time. In fact, that really accurate time is how GPS works.) Your company may even run its own NTP servers, but there are plenty of public servers available.

While we’re on the subject, your Linux computer keeps time in a very funny fashion. It counts the seconds since the epoch. The “UNIX Epoch” is an arbitrary date and time. Specifically, it counts the seconds since January 1st, 1970 at 00:00:00 UTC. I’ll write an article on the subject at some point. It is also sometimes referred to as “POSIX Time”. In the meantime, you can always look it up at your favorite search engine. 

Time is very important to Linux. After all, the kernel is a task scheduler. It’s also important for accurate record keeping, among other things. It’s also not difficult to enable NTP in Linux.

NOTE: This article assumes you’re using systemd, as most mainstream distros do. If this isn’t true, this article isn’t for you.

Enable NTP In Linux:

Yes, this is another article that requires an open terminal. You can usually just press CTRL + ALT + T to open your default terminal. If that’s not true, fix the keybindings!

If you’re a desktop user, you can probably skip this article. If you’re a desktop Linux user, odds are good that your distro came preconfigured to sync the time already. Let’s go ahead and verify that with this command:

What you’re looking for is these lines:

You’re especially interested in the last line. If that line says that the NTP service is active, you can ignore this article and read one of the prior articles on the timedatectl command:

How To: Find Your Timezone In The Terminal
How To: Change The Timezone

If the NTP service is not active, you can start the service with this command:

That’s all you need to do to enable NTP in Linux.

If you want to disable NTP, that’s just as easy. That command looks like this:

Next, you can run this command to confirm that you’ve enabled NTP:

That should output information that says the NTP service is active. It may not say that the clock has synchronized as that may take some time before the scheduled task runs and syncs your time with a dedicated time-keeping server.

If you want to muck about with the settings, they’re viewed here:

You’d edit that file with Nano, or some other terminal text editor. Before doing so, you should first read the man page, with this command:

There you go! You can enable NTP in Linux!

Closure:

It seems that I’ve developed a few different styles for my article writing. Longer articles get treated differently, as in they’re formatted differently. The shorter articles have been formatted like this for quite a while. I think that’s a comfortable mix, though it is (as always) subject to change. As I learn and grow, so too may the formatting.

Anyhow, this seemed like a fun article to write. I doubt it’ll be all that popular. It’s unlikely to rank all that well in the search engines. Still, it’ll be information that’s on the site, and the more information I have the better I think I’ll be doing.

It’s not always about the traffic. Indeed, it was never really about the traffic. The traffic is secondary. My primary objective is to share information. Today’s article covered how to enable NTP in Linux. Further, it is limited to just those who use systemd.

Most of my readers will have no use for this information. But, there will be someone – and maybe only that one someone – who will find this information and need it to enable NTP on their Linux device. Good. To that reader and my regulars, I say thanks for visiting.

Now my usual blurb at the bottom of every article…

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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