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How To: Install PIP In Linux

Today’s article is going to teach you how to install PIP in Linux. PIP is a reverse acronym meaning ‘PIP Installs Packages” and it’s a handy tool for the installation and management of Python applications. This article should be pretty short and easy for anyone to understand.

This article is going to be pretty basic, merely telling you how to install PIP and not a whole lot more. The reason I write this article is because it needs to be written. I should also point out that Python is a programming language, though I’d expect most visitors to know that already. But, yes, this article needed to be written.

See, I wanted to tell you about a lovely piece of software (or three), but they all need to be installed with PIP. So, rather than write out the long installation instructions for various distros and package managers each time, I figured I’d make a single article that told you how to install PIP.

That’ll save some time and effort. I can refer back to this when those articles are written. There are many Python applications that can be installed with relative ease – just like you’re installing from your regular Linux repositories. PIP’s Python applications can be installed and uninstalled in the terminal while using PIP, so it’s quite easy.

So then, let’s learn how to…

Install PIP In Linux:

Installing PIP requires a 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.

Once you have the terminal open, you can install the appropriate PIP. Most folks will be using Python 3, but a smattering of people will still be using Python 2. I will list the installation instructions, where applicable, with Python 2’s instructions first.

Debian/Ubuntu/derivatives:

sudo apt install python-pip
sudo apt install python3-pip

1 2	sudo apt install python-pip sudo apt install python3-pip

SUSE/openSUSE/derivatives:

sudo zypper install python-pip
sudo zypper install python3-pip

1 2	sudo zypper install python-pip sudo zypper install python3-pip

Fedora/derivatives:

sudo dnf install python-pip
sudo dnf install python3-pip

1 2	sudo dnf install python-pip sudo dnf install python3-pip

RHEL/CentOS/derivatives:

sudo yum install epel-release
sudo yum install python-pip
sudo yum install python3-pip

sudo yum install epel-release

sudo yum install python-pip

sudo yum install python3-pip

Arch/Manjaro/derivatives:

sudo pacman -S python2-pip
sudo pacman -S python-pip

1 2	sudo pacman -S python2-pip sudo pacman -S python-pip

Slackware:

Read Install PIP For Slackwaare Instructions.

The basic usage of PIP is pip install <package>, pip uninstall <package>, and pip search <package>. My readers are smart enough to understand that without further instructions. You can also learn a lot by using man pip. Now you know how to install PIP in Linux.

Closure:

And there you have it. You have an article telling you how to install PIP in Linux, enabling you to install Python packages/programs quickly and easily inside the Linux terminal. It’s also one more article in my series of articles. I’m now well within a month of when the project is allowed to end and I still have a lot of articles left in me, so I’d expect it to keep going for long into the future. Or at least until someone steps up and takes the site over for me.

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.

Monitor TCP/UDP In Real Time

If you’re concerned about network connections to your device, you may want to monitor TCP/UDP in real time. It’s a pretty handy way to get a handle on what connections are being made by your devices. This article could be pretty complicated, but I’ll try to make sense of it all.

By the way, if you ever want to be sure you know something, try explaining it to someone who knows nothing about it. It can be pretty humbling. Leave a comment letting me know how I did.

Anyhow, moving on…

Network connections happen on various ports. Think of them as though your computer is a country and you have various ports that let traffic in and let traffic out.

There are different kinds of traffic, just like there are different kinds of ships. You have leisure, goods, military ships, etc… You have cruise ships, tankers, cargo yachts, kayaks, aircraft carriers, etc. Traffic is often bidirectional, meaning going in and leaving on the same port. In the case of TCP and UDP, traffic is bidirectional so one port will accommodate both.

So…

What Are TCP and UDP Anyhow?

In the case of TCP, you may be familiar with the expression TCP/IP, and it stands for Transmission Control Protocol. TCP requires a server/client relationship and should only be used on certain ports. Those ports are things like FTP, SSH, SMTP, Time, TELNET, etc… So, if you know you don’t have an FTP server running, you really shouldn’t be seeing traffic on ports 20 or 21.

UDP, on the other hand, stands for “User Datagram Protocol”. Unlike UDP, there’s no client/server relationship required. It just spews traffic out as needed/ordered. UDP connections do things like check a DNS server to find the IP address for a domain name. It then waits for the server to respond. There’s less latency and it’s more useful for ‘real time’ processes. Voice and video may be sent using UDP. Again, if you’re seeing unrecognized traffic, there may be a problem.

If you want, you can get a general idea (you don’t really need to memorize this) of what belongs where, with regards of TCP/UDP traffic. Wikipedia has an excellent list of TCP/UDP port numbers.

So, with that information at hand, you can see why you might want to …

Monitor TCP/UDP In Real Time:

This article requires an open terminal, like many other articles on this site. 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.

Once you have your terminal open, you can use ‘netstat’ and examine this in detail. If you just want to check once, you can run this command:

sudo netstat -tulpn

1	sudo netstat -tulpn

To monitor it in real time, you’ll just use the ‘watch’ command. That’d look like this:

sudo watch netstat -tulpn

1	sudo watch netstat -tulpn

You can use the -n flag to change the refresh interval, as it will default to every two seconds. To make it every five seconds, the command would look like this:

sudo watch -n 5 netstat -tulpn

1	sudo watch -n 5 netstat -tulpn

You can change that number, but you can go no lower than once ever 0.1 seconds. I’m not sure if there’s an upper threshold, but it might have one.

Either way, you can monitor your TCP/IP connections in real time. It’s not really all that difficult. You may see some results that alarm you, but odds are you’re just new to checking the output. Before getting alarmed and making drastic changes to your computer, research to see if the connection is actually just normal traffic.

Closure:

And there you have it, you have another article to read. This one is about how you can monitor TCP/UDP in real time, a useful tool if you’re concerned with your network’s traffic. Malicious activities will likely require network ingress and egress, so this can help your security assessments. Strange connections don’t necessarily mean there’s a problem – but they do mean you might want to look to see what’s causing the connections.

Remove Default Music Player In Elementary OS

It can be a little confusing if you want to remove the default music player in Elementary OS. It isn’t really all that clear immediately, so here’s an article explaining how to remove the default music player in Elementary OS.

The default music player in Elementary OS (eOS from here out) is kinda lame. There are many better choices out there. Once you’ve chosen a replacement music player, this is how you remove the default music player in eOS.

This was first asked on a forum that I frequent and I took the time to find the answer. I figured that I’d not been able to easily find the answer with a search engine, so I might as well turn it into an article. It’s actually pretty simple.

eOS lacks any handy GUI system monitor that I could find, so I installed one. You might as well do the same. With eOS, you’re eventually going to want it – though top or htop or even atop do the job just as well.

Anyhow, I installed one and found that closing the “io.elementary.music” process closed the music player. Obviously, you can’t uninstall that. It’s part of some bigger package and eOS does things in unusual ways.

With further digging, I finally noticed an application called ‘noise’ in the list of running processes. Killing it would kill the music player, just like killing the io.elementary.music process would. Finding this out pleased me, as that was the answer.

Remove Default Music Player:

With that information in hand and properly tested, I was able to give the answer. The answer began with telling them to open their terminal, which you can do easily enough. Just press CTRL + ALT + T and your default terminal should open.

With the terminal open, it’s just one single command:

sudo apt remove noise

1	sudo apt remove noise

It’s so intertwined with eOS that you might want to reboot after you’re done. You can do that with the following command:

sudo reboot

1	sudo reboot

And there you have it. That’s all you need to do. I’m not sure why eOS makes it so difficult to find this. I’m also not sure why it wasn’t widely published, but it’s online now. Technically, it was online before now -at my old site. This is actually an old article that was redone to suit this site.

Closure:

We are getting closer to the one year mark. It’s less than a month away. I’m probably going to take a day or two off and then get back to the regular schedule – though with maybe a little less pressure to get it done every other day. It’s great when I have a half dozen articles done and ready to publish, but not so much when I’ve run out of ideas and I need an article for tomorrow. Ah well…

Change Your DNS Servers To Google’s In Lubuntu

This article will show you how to change your DNS servers from your default servers to the DNS servers run by Google, specifically while you’re using Lubuntu. If you’re not using Lubuntu, the process is likely fairly similar. Either way, it should be a nice and fun article, and we’ll even do it in the GUI instead of the terminal.

So, what is DNS? DNS stands for ‘Domain Name System’. As you know by now, machines are identified by their IP address. It’d suck to have to remember numbers instead of names. It’s also possible to route multiple domain names to the same IP address. So, we have domain names and use those domain names to resolve to IP addresses.

If you’re like most people, right now the DNS servers you’re using have come from your ISP – the folks who provide your internet service. This means that they can see which sites you visit, based on the requests you make to the DNS service.

Some folks don’t like this and prefer to find another DNS provider. (There’s also Secure DNS which this article will not be touching on.) One of those companies that provides free DNS servers is Google. Like them or not, their DNS servers are robust and consistently updated, often making domain propagation quicker for you.

This article is for Lubuntu, as stated above, but you may very well be able to follow the same exact steps with your distro of choice. And, now that you have a general idea of what’s going on, let’s learn how to…

Change Your DNS Servers:

To get started with changing your DNS servers, you need to find your networking icon in your system tray. It’ll be down on the right, not far from the clock. Once you have found it, right click on it so that it brings up the menu to let you “Edit Connections”. It will look something like this:

change network settings — Of course, your version won’t have the nifty arrow.

You’ll want to click the gear icon. That’s why I put the arrow there!

That will open another window. This window will have tabs you need to worry about – or a tab you need to know about. You probably shouldn’t need both. The tabs you’re interested in will look like this:

changing the network connections — You should need one of those, probably not both of those…

Now, you should only need to edit one of those. If you’re still using IPv4 then you use that tab. If you’re using IPv6 then you’ll obviously want to use the appropriate tab. For example, the IPv4 would look like this:

screen to edit dns servers — This would be the tab you’re looking for, pretty much…

Now, where that arrow is is where you want to enter the new DNS server information. You separate them with a comma, though you can use a comma and a space – there will need to be a comma.

For Google’s IPv4 addresses, your choices for 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4.

For Google’s IPv6 addresses, your choices are 2001:4860:4860::8888 and 2001:4860:4860::8844.

Note: The ifconfig or ip addr will help you tell if you have IPv4 or IPv6.

When you’re done, be sure to click the save button to ensure your new settings take effect. Remember the screen and changes, should things go pear shaped. You can undo this easily enough.

This will, of course, work with any set of DNS servers out there. You can use it with other servers if you aren’t a fan of Google. This can serve as a general guideline for other servers, should you wish.

Closure:

Yup… There it is. You have another article. This time, it tells you how to change your DNS servers if you use Lubuntu. Again, it’ll work for other distros, but I’m only including pictures/vouching for it with Lubuntu.

How To: Clear The Terminal Screen

Today, we’re going to learn to clear the terminal screen. This is generally done for privacy’s sake. You don’t want people to be able to scroll up and see what you’ve been reading in the terminal. This probably isn’t as important if you’re the only user and you’re in your house, but you may still like to keep things clean and tidy.

We’ll go ahead and cover two ways to clear the terminal in this article. They’re both rather easy commands and you’ll find this article is definitely not all that complicated, or even very long. This is pretty much one of the first things folks should have learned when they started using the terminal. We might as well cover it here.

Rather than make this long-winded, we’ll just make this into a short and easy article to read. Let’s all learn how to…

Clear The Terminal:

To be clear, this just erases the text in the terminal. It clears the scrollback content so that folks can’t scroll up and see the previous terminal contents. Again, it’s a good idea to do if you’re in a multi-user environment where people may have access to your screen and you don’t want them to know what has been written to the terminal.

Obviously, you need a terminal for this article. Just press CTRL + ALT + T and your default terminal should open.

I suppose we’ll need some content, so let’s try using this command:

ls -la

ls -la

That should fill your terminal up.

Now, to clear it you can use either of the two following commands:

clear

clear

Or you can also use:

reset

reset

(Though reset may leave a little text at the top, it still removes the terminal’s scrollback history.)

Both of those will do the job, with ‘clear’ being the obvious winner = but it’s nice to have options. They’ll clear the scrollback in the terminal, preventing folks from scrolling up to read what has previously been written there. Of course, they could potentially still press the arrow up button and see what commands you’ve written, so you can try to prevent that as well.

Closure:

See? I told you that it’d be a quick and easy article. It’s not all that taxing to learn how to clear your terminal and that’s all that this article is meant to cover. Both of the two commands have a man page, but they’re not very useful commands for anything else but clearing the terminal. Have an easy day, a day where you can (maybe) say you learned something and not have to read a long article. After all, it was a quick and easy day for me!