Linux Tips • Page 53 of 115 • Getting you up to speed!

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:

git clone https://github.com/WhoseTheNerd/ramfetch

1	git clone https://github.com/WhoseTheNerd/ramfetch

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

sudo cp ramfetch/ramfetch /usr/local/bin/

1	sudo cp ramfetch/ramfetch /usr/local/bin/

The next step is to make Ramfetch executable:

sudo chmod +x /usr/local/bin/ramfetch

1	sudo chmod +x /usr/local/bin/ramfetch

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

ramfetch

ramfetch

Your output might look a little something like this:

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.

Let’s Have A Happy New Year In The Terminal

Today’s article is going to be just another fun article, where we have a happy New Year in the terminal. Why in the terminal? Because, why not in the terminal? If you want to celebrate the New Year holiday in the terminal, read on and see how.

You won’t learn much in this article, but it can tie back to a couple of previous articles. This is just a fun article. As for articles it might tie into, check these previous articles:

Add A Message Of the Day (MOTD) To SSH
How To: Show An SSH Banner

If you read those two articles, or somehow remember them, you’ll see a common theme mentioned – that is ‘ASCII’. ASCII stands for “American Standard Code for Information Interchange”. Or, in plain language, text.

Text, terminal, and a New Year celebration? Darned right, we’re gonna have fun. Well, maybe not too much fun… But, I promise it won’t be too educational.

Yes, I realize that there are a variety of calendars on the planet. Yes, I know that there are other New Year celebrations. If this isn’t your New Year holiday, though this will technically be posted on my New Year’s Eve day, you can save this article and celebrate it when your holiday rolls around.

So, with all that in mind, let’s go ahead and get into the article…

Happy New Year In The Terminal:

You guessed it, you need an open terminal! So, open one up. 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, install ‘figlet’.

APT using distros:

sudo apt install figlet

1	sudo apt install figlet

YUM using distros:

sudo yum install figlet

1	sudo yum install figlet

DNF using distros:

sudo dnf install figlet

1	sudo dnf install figlet

You may find ‘figlet’ available for other distros. If you do, you should install it before going on. You will need ‘figlet’ for the remainder of this article.

With ‘figlet’ now installed, you can check the man page:

man figlet

1	man figlet

We’ll just be using a couple of features available with ‘figlet’, but the man page is pretty informative. You can do quite a bit with ‘figlet’.

Using figlet:

While still in your terminal, you can just use ‘figlet’ in its most basic form:

figlet Happy New Year

1	figlet Happy New Year

The output of that command should look similar to this image:

figlet displaying a banner in the terminal — See? You have your terminal saying Happy New Year! Festive, huh?!?

You can also use ‘figlet’ by loading the data from the file. It’s easy enough to use ‘figlet’ to display information from a file, I’ll show you. Let’s use one of my favorites, nano:

Let’s start by making the file:

nano hny

nano hny

Add the following text:

Happy New Year

1	Happy New Year

Now save the file with nano. That’s pretty easy, but I’ll show you. Just press CTRL + X, then Y, and then ENTER. That should save the file as ‘hny’ in whatever directory you were working in.

So, let’s use ‘figlet’ to show the contents of our ‘hny’ file:

figlet -p < hny

1	figlet -p < hny

There you have it. If you go back to the article’s introduction, you’ll see a couple of links. In those instances, you can actually call ‘figlet’ to show the contents of a file, for things like an SSH banner. They all kinda tie together, if you want them to.

Closure:

And there you have it. You have another article. This time, you’ve learned nothing – except how to have a happy New Year in the terminal. Well, you’ve also learned a bit about ‘figlet’, which is nice. Either way, enjoy the holiday and thanks for sticking with me throughout the past year!

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:

echo $DESKTOP_SESSION

1	echo $DESKTOP_SESSION

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:

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!

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:

lspci -k | grep -EA3 'VGA|3D|Display'

1	lspci -k \| grep -EA3 'VGA\|3D\|Display'

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:

sudo lshw -c video

1	sudo lshw -c video

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.

Let’s Have Christmas In The Terminal

Today’s article is just another fun article. In this article, we’re going to learn how to have Christmas in the terminal. You won’t learn much of anything useful, but you may have some mild entertainment. Read on!

As you know, a lot of these articles are things you can do in a terminal. So, what’s better than making a Christmas tree in the terminal? It seems like a reasonable article to write, as today’s article will have been published on Christmas Day.

Not everyone who reads this site will be among those who celebrate Christmas. Personally, I’m an atheist that kinda appreciates the Buddhist philosophies. I celebrate Christmas as an excuse to share good times with friends and family, a chance to give back to those who have enriched my life.

So, if you don’t celebrate Christmas, that’s fine. You don’t have to participate in this article. You could also just call it a Holiday Tree, I suppose. Hopefully you’ll use this opportunity to show your appreciation for those around you, even if you celebrate Festivus!

Alright, that’s enough ‘serious’ stuff for one article. Let’s just get into how to have Christmas in the terminal!

Christmas In The Terminal:

As the title implies, and like so many other articles, you’re gonna need an open terminal in order to have Christmas in the terminal. So, open your terminal of choice. 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, download a handy script to get started:

wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/sergiolepore/ChristBASHTree/master/tree-EN.sh

1	wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/sergiolepore/ChristBASHTree/master/tree-EN.sh

Next, we’ll make that file executable:

chmod +x ./tree-EN.sh

1	chmod +x ./tree-EN.sh

Now, we’ll run the program/execute the script:

./tree-EN.sh

1	./tree-EN.sh

The end result should look a whole lot like this:

That video should not autoplay. You’ll have to press the play button on your own. I too dislike any videos that webmasters deem should be automatically played. I assume you dislike that as well. So… You’re welcome!

Anyhow, there you have it… You have a Christmas tree in your terminal, just as the title suggested you would. Happy Holidays!

Closure and Some Thanks:

When I started this site, I was excited if I got twenty visitors in a single day. Well, the site has grown a whole lot since then. It has become an important part of my life and the thanks goes to you for reading, commenting, encouraging, providing feedback, etc… Without all that, I’d have never kept it up this long. So, thanks!

As for Christmas, I hope you’re all having a great day today. If you want to give me one gift, get offline (after rating the article, of course) and spend some time letting your friends and family know how much you appreciate them. It’s a good day to do so, even if you don’t particularly care for the holiday.