Tag: benchmark

hardinfo Has Been Rebooted As hardinfo2

If you’ve used hardinfo in the past, it may interest you to know that hardinfo has been rebooted as hardinfo2. This is just a quick ‘news’ article and won’t take up much of your time. It’s worth reading, however!

So, I wrote this some time ago:

Graphically Examine Hardware Info With HardInfo

I assume that’s how user ‘hwspeedy’ found this site and they sent me an email letting me know that hardinfo (no caps, I guess) has been rebooted as hardinfo2. That piqued my interest.

hardinfo2:

I looked and the project appears to have a dozen or so people behind it. That many people is a good start, which made me optimistic You can view the hardinfo2 project page here at the following link:

hardinfo Home Page

The original, hardinfo, hadn’t had any recent updates. These folks rebooted it. Their goal is to get hardinfo2 into all the distros and they’re 60% of the way there. I’m impressed enough to go ahead and write about it here.

The two major changes are the theme aspect, which I found silly and it made the text impossible to read on this system. Fortunately, you can turn it off. The second major change is the ability to upload your benchmarks. You can see how your system compares to others.

They have releases for pretty much every major version of Linux. See here:

Get hardinfo For Your System

I had hardinfo installed and hardinfo2 didn’t want to install. So, I purged hardinfo from my system with the following command:

I was then able to install hardinfo2. I did so with gdebi.

With the new version installed, I was quickly able to click on View > Themes > Disable Theme. That made it so that I could make out what was going on. Otherwise, it looked like this on a Linux Mint system:

Themes don't work well here...
None of the other themes fared better than this one did. You can disable them entirely.

This is just my refurbished PC that runs Linux Mint, so it’s nothing special. Even if it was, you wouldn’t know until you disabled themes.

Here it is with the themes disabled:

It's easy to disable themes in hardinfo2.
That’s much easier for these old eyes to make out. I’m pretty sure the themes don’t work well.

I went through the list and even did the benchmark thing. Things mostly seem to work. Some of the benchmarks didn’t show my level in the results, but that’s possibly just a teething issue.

This is useful if you need support – just click on Generate Report. You can generate a report to share with the forums when asking for support.

This is also useful for bragging rights – just click on Synchronize. You can see how you rank, and share it, against other users. As they’re now modern results, you probably won’t be dominating all the benchmarks as you did with the older hardinfo.

I have high hopes for these new developers. After I saw their email, I figured I’d share that information with you. I ignore most of that stuff but this is an application that I’ve used time and time again. It’s also an application that I’ve recommended. Seeing some people pick up and run with the task makes me happy. I wish them the best of luck.

I will point out that the sync button uploads a bunch of information. You can pick and choose what you upload; nothing nefarious is going on there. It’s simply a system-gathering (and benchmarking) tool and nothing more.

Closure:

Well, there’s not much more to cover. It still does the basic tasks as listed in the first article, it’s just now got some new features and is now being actively developed. It’s good to see some of the old tools being used and it’s good to see people acting when they see a lapse in the system. Without them, we’d not have much of an operating system.

So, thanks!

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Benchmark Your GPU In Lubuntu

Today we have a simple enough article, meant for fun and information, as we talk about how to benchmark your GPU in Lubuntu. This won’t be a very long and complicated article. Even a new user should be able to follow along.

We all like to know where we stand in life. This is true even with computers. At the very least, we want to know that our computer can accomplish the tasks we need it to accomplish. One of the ways you can do this is to benchmark your computer.

I’ve previously written a couple of articles that involve benchmarking.

Benchmark Your Linux Box With Geekbench 5
Check Disk Speed In The Terminal
Graphically Examine Hardware Info With HardInfo

So, this isn’t a foreign concept to my regular readers (whom I appreciate a great deal).

A benchmark pushes your hardware to the limits and then gives you a score telling you how well it did. Usually, the next step will be using your search engine to find out how well you did against other computers. (Those with older and slow computers may not do this, but I did with a recently purchased refurbished device, and it did not do well – but it still perfectly satisfies my needs.)

Your GPU obviously controls your graphics. I do not need massive graphic capabilities. I’m content with onboard graphics and my benchmark score shows this. At most, I’m going to stream a video, watch a movie, or play a game that doesn’t require high-end graphics.

You should know about Lubuntu already. The directions for this article are for Lubuntu, but will likely work with most other distros. For this exercise, we’ll be using glmark2.

Installing glmark2:

The first step to using glmark2 is opening your terminal. To open your terminal, CTRL + ALT + T. Then, with your terminal now open, enter the following command to ensure your system’s application database is up to date:

Let that run its course and don’t worry about upgrading at this point. You can always do that later, though I’d suggest doing so as soon as realistically possible because updates tend to contain security updates and those are important.

The next goal is to install glmark2 and you do that with this command:

If you’re not using Lubuntu and you’re using a distro with Wayland, then you want a different command. That command might be something like this:

With glmark2 now installed, it would be worth your time to check the man page. This article will only cover the very basic command, literally running the command without any flags, but there are many options available for you. To check the man page, use this command:

As you can see, there are quite a few options available. I will not be doing a deep dive into those options. You can easily figure most of them out on your own. Heck, you can probably figure them all out with a little trial and error.

Now that you have the GPU benchmarking tool, glmark2, installed in Lubuntu you can run the command in the terminal…

Benchmark Your GPU In Lubuntu:

If you’ve installed glmark2 and checked the man page, you’ll see that we’ve chosen the right tool for the job. The man page describes glmark2 as:

glmark2 – OpenGL (ES) 2.0 benchmark suite

So, assuming you’ve kept your terminal open (if not, open it again) then you need to simply use the command’s name to run a benchmark on your system. It’s that simple to benchmark your GPU in Lubuntu. Just try this command:

In theory, you should not do anything with your computer while this runs. I, of course, did not listen to that advice and I’m perfectly okay with that. As I mentioned above, my graphical needs are not high. The Intel graphics are just fine for me.

That’s going to take a while, especially on an older computer like mine – and one with just an onboard GPU. This should open a new window and display a bunch of graphics in that window. If you didn’t do this in full-screen mode, that is without any flags to set that value, you’ll also be able to see quite a lot of information scrolling by in your terminal. Someone smarter than I am can tell you what that information means.

Wait for the benchmark to end, that’s when the new window closes, and collect your score from the terminal. Mine was not very high.

Then, use your favorite search engine to see how well you did compared to other users. If you want to compare your score against other computers, you can try this OpenBenchmarking link. I’m sure there are other sites where you can compare your score with others. That’s just the one I happened to find in a very brief search.

Closure:

So, I don’t know if you actually want to benchmark your GPU in Lubuntu. If you do, now you know how. It’s not terribly complicated and it is something you can do in just a few short minutes.

You’re not supposed to use your computer at the same time, but I had dozens of windows open and was streaming a video during my benchmark. In my case, it doesn’t matter to me. I have no need for more powerful graphics and I’m content with the performance I get from this device. It’s perfectly capable of meeting my needs.

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Benchmark Your Linux Box With Geekbench 5

Today’s article will teach you how to benchmark your Linux box with Geekbench 5. It’s a fairly simple exercise, even for a beginner. Parts of the directions for this exercise will change with time, so I hope to make it obvious how you would make said command changes.

What is a benchmark? It’s a measure of your system’s performance. In this case, it tests things like CPU performance, graphics performance, and memory performance. When done, it gives you a handy URL where you can see the results online and share them with your friends.

For example, I have a benchmark result here. That one isn’t as good as it could have been. For example, I had a pile of applications open and hadn’t even been rebooted in about 60 days. See?

Ideally, you’ll run your benchmark with a clean slate. That’ll give you the best results. Be sure to reboot and make sure you’re running as few processes as is reasonable to get the best result.

Why benchmark? Well, it’s good to know how your hardware stacks up. It’s also good for bragging rights, if you’re into that sort of thing. It’s a valuable bit of information if you’re into overclocking. (Overclocking is tweaking at the hardware level to make your system run faster than it is designed for.) It’s a way to measure the performance gains from overclocking.

Well, this article will tell you how to benchmark, using Geekbench 5. It’s not as challenging as one might think!

Benchmark Linux With Geekbench 5:

This article requires an open 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 get your terminal open, run the following commands:

That’s going to download the Geekbench 5 benchmarking software for Linux. However, that URL is going to change because the name of the download is going to change when Geekbench releases new versions.

If it has changed – and it WILL change eventually – you can get the new address by clicking on this link. The name of the file is also going to change the following command. It’s an obvious change that you’ll need to make. The current next command is:

That will extract all the files into their own directory. The directory name will also change. So, for this particular file, the next command is this:

Oddly, I didn’t need to make the “geekbench5” file executable, I just ran it with sudo. It looks like:

Now, you wait…

It shouldn’t take very long, though it may take a while on older computers. It will tell you what it’s checking as it checks it and, when done, it will give you a URL to check your results. It’ll look something like this:

geekbench click to see results
That address is where you’ll be able to see your results. Uploading is mandatory with the free version.

You can pay for a copy of Geekbench 5 and get your results locally, or so I understand. I’ve not actually tried it. The free version uploads the results, which I presume they use to crunch additional data, gauging the computers currently in use. They may even provide said data to others, but I’m sure it’s reasonably anonymous. Their privacy policy is located here.

Closure:

And there you have it. You now have your benchmark results in a handy web-page. You can also register to keep track of your previous benchmarks, even adding new results to your collection as you go. Me? I only bothered benchmarking my test laptop and it turned out better than I had expected.

There are other benchmarking utilities. You can use ‘hardinfo’ for some benchmarks, even comparative benchmarks – but older ones, by reading my hardinfo article. If you do benchmark your systems, feel free to leave some comments here or wherever you find this on social media.

Thanks for reading!

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