hardware Archives • Linux Tips

How To: List USB Devices

Today’s article might look like a funny headline, where the subject would be how to list USB devices. Today, we’ll have a relatively short article. It’s not complicated and you’ve already learned how to list USB devices! Wait-a-minute!

After all, you’ve already been told how to do this. In fact, I’ve written an article on this very subject! See:

A Little About The ‘lsusb’ Command.

That article covered how to list USB devices, using the lsusb command. Right?

Yes. Yes, it did.

But, this is Linux and there’s another command that doesn’t get enough attention. In fact, I’d wager (a small amount) that many of you wouldn’t have used this command before.

What is this mystery command? It’s really easy to remember. It’s not complicated, it’s simply “usb-devices”. On the man page, the command describes itself as:

usb-devices – print USB device details

Sure enough, that’s what it does. But, unlike the ‘lsusb’ command, this command spits out a whole lot more information by default. There’s not a whole lot more to say about it, and I’m making this article extra short. So…

List USB Devices:

As implied in the opening part of this article, you’re going to need 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.

With your terminal now open, simply run the command:

usb-devices

1	usb-devices

If you check the man page, you’ll find that that’s it. There’s nothing special to do with this command, you just run it. The man page contains this:

usb-devices is a (bash) shell script that can be used to display details of USB buses in the system and the devices connected to them.

It might be the easiest command you’ll ever run – and it’s also easy to remember. So, why is it so unknown? Well, we use ‘lsusb’ for listing USB devices and the command doesn’t rank well in search engines, but it’s at the bottom of many such articles. It also doesn’t do much more than list USB devices, as it’s just some sort of a built-in bit of shell scripting.

Closure:

So, I figured I’d do an extra short article today. Why not? We’ve done some longer articles lately, so we might as well try the super-short format. It helps that I didn’t dive off-topic or the like, but simply explained how to list USB devices. Do you have any thoughts on articles in this shorter format?

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.

Smash a button!

[Total: 6 Average: 5]

How To: Install Proprietary Drivers In Ubuntu

Today is going to be a very quick and easy article, where we learn how to install proprietary drivers in Ubuntu – in the terminal, of course. It’s easy enough for a new user, as it’s just a single command. It’s also not all that well known and not documented in the man pages or anything, so I might as well cover it here.

There are all sorts of reasons why you might want to install proprietary drivers in Ubuntu. Some of your hardware may not work at all until you do. Some of your hardware will only have partial functionality until you do install the proprietary drivers.

Of course, if everything is working just fine, you might not even need to worry about the proprietary drivers in Ubuntu. If everything is fine, there’s no reason to worry too much. You know what they say, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.”

Of course, a subset of you will say, “If it ain’t broke, tweak it!”

Anyhow, this article only applies to Ubuntu and official Ubuntu flavors. It likely also applies to Ubuntu derivatives. A quick check seems to indicate that Mint is one of those derivatives that support this command. We’ll only cover it from the Ubuntu-specific direction. If it also works for you, that’s a benefit. If it doesn’t work for your distro, the maintainers likely took it out for a reason.

So then, let’s get to work installing proprietary drivers on Ubuntu…

How To Install Proprietary Drivers In Ubuntu:

As mentioned above, we’ll be doing this in the terminal. So, you’re going to need an open terminal for this exercise. You can just press CTRL + ALT + T and your default terminal should open.

With the terminal now open, we need to ensure you have the “Restricted” repository enabled. As you already have a terminal open, we might as well do that while in the terminal. So, type the following command:

sudo add-apt-repository restricted

1	sudo add-apt-repository restricted

Now, you need to update your database of software that’s available and we might as well make sure all other software is up to date. You do that with this command:

sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade -y

1	sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade -y

There you go. You’re now ready to install proprietary drivers in Ubuntu. So, while it’s a single command, it may require some preparation for some users. If you’ve run the above commands, we should be on the same page. So, with that, you just run the following command:

sudo ubuntu-drivers autoinstall

1	sudo ubuntu-drivers autoinstall

If there are any prompts, just go ahead and press the Y button. Everything should go smoothly and you may need to reboot after installing the proprietary drivers. When you’ve done that, you should be using the newly installed drivers instead of the open-source (or no) drivers.

That’s all there is to it…

Closure:

There you have it! You have another article. I know I told you that it was just a single command and then shared more than one command, but it is just one command so long as you’ve got the Restricted repository enabled already (and I think most of us do). Either way, there’s a quick and easy way to install proprietary drivers in Ubuntu, in the terminal even. ‘Snot all that difficult after all!

Smash a button!

[Total: 5 Average: 5]

A Little About The ‘lscpu’ Command

In today’s article we’re going to do what the title says, we’re going to learn a little about the ‘lscpu’ command. We’ll just touch the ways you’re likely to use ‘lscpu’ and that’s it. Then again, there’s not much more to it than that, so it’s going to be easy enough for a new Linux user to understand. You’re invited to read on…

As mentioned in the last article, and in the article before that, I’m going to take some time to cover some of the basic commands. However, I’m going to try to intersperse them, that is mix them up a bit, so that it’s not too boring for myself and my regular readers who are beyond this level.

The first of these articles was:

A Little About The ‘lsusb’ Command.

This article will cover ‘lscpu’. If it’s not obvious, this command will list information about your CPU. In fact, the man page describes ‘lscpu’ like:

lscpu – display information about the CPU architecture

And, sure enough, that’s the information we’re after in this article.

Of course, this is another command that gets run in the terminal. It’s an application that comes with ‘util-linux’ and is something you shouldn’t need to install. You should be able to use the ‘lscpu’ command without installing anything. So, there’s that…

Rather than drag the intro out, let’s just jump into it…

About The ‘lscpu’ Command:

As I mentioned in the intro, ‘lscpu’ is a terminal command. Of course, this means you need an open terminal. You should open one now. If you don’t know how to open your terminal, just press CTRL + ALT + T and your default terminal should open.

With your terminal now open, simply run the ‘lscpu’ command:

lscpu

lscpu

Tada! You have all the information you really need to know about your CPU – and quite a bit more information. So, let’s see what else we can do with the ‘lscpu’ command.

Let’s say you want some extended information. You can go about that with the -e flag. That’s easy enough to do, a simple command. It looks like this:

lscpu -e

lscpu -e

The outcome from that command would probably look a bit like:

the output of lscpu — As you can see, this CPU isn’t anything all that fancy. It’s effective and efficient!

As you can see, there’s nothing too fancy there.

You can actually select the fields you want to output from that command. For example, you can see the CPU and the CORE fields like this:

lscpu -e=cpu,core

1	lscpu -e=cpu,core

The only other way you’re going to use ‘lscpu’ is likely to be with grep. For example, if you want to know what architecture your CPU supports, you can run this command:

lscpu | grep Architecture

1	lscpu \| grep Architecture

There’s more to ‘lscpu’, but you’re not likely to really need it for anything. If you do need more from ‘lscpu’, you just check the man page like so:

man lscpu

man lscpu

The man page should help you with anything more than what’s covered in this article. There’s not all that much more that’s useful, we’ve at least examined the ‘lscpu’ command.

Closure:

Yup, there’s another article. This article does what it attempted to do – which is share the most useful ways to use the ‘lscpu’. If you find yourself in a position where you need fairly detailed CPU commands, then ‘lscpu’ is the command you’re looking for.

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.

Smash a button!

[Total: 4 Average: 5]

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.

Smash a button!

[Total: 4 Average: 4.3]

One Way To See CPU Information

Today, we’re going to explore one way to see CPU information. On the original site, I had a couple of articles about this sort of stuff but we didn’t cover this method. It’s a short and sweet process, though I’ll show you a couple of ways to process the output.

The date that this will be published is July 4th. That’s a holiday in the United States. Not only do I live here, the vast majority of my readers live here (according to the stats I have). So, this will be a nice and easy article. For those of you who reside elsewhere, you’re welcome. You won’t have to work too hard today to understand what’s going on.

Anyhow, we’re not going to use any special tools. We’re not going to use any applications that you don’t already have installed. While we likely could, there really isn’t any need to. This being Linux, the information we’re after is already in a file. All we need to do is read that file.

So, let’s get to it…

How To See CPU Information:

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.

With your terminal now open, let’s go ahead and read the file we need if we want to see the CPU information:

cat /proc/cpuinfo

1	cat /proc/cpuinfo

That’ll output a ton of text. You can read it as it is, or you can actually get it in a more readable form using the ‘less’ command. To do that, you just change out the ‘cat’ command, like so:

less /proc/cpuinfo

1	less /proc/cpuinfo

Now, just use the arrows on your keyboard to scroll down (or back up) through the text. When you want to close the output and return to the terminal, just press Q and it will close.

Closure:

That’s it. That’s all there is to this article that tells you how to see CPU information. It’s not a very tough article, and it’s quick. So, I met those goals! Yay me! Enjoy your holiday, even if the holiday is just a nice quick article that doesn’t require much thinking. Me? I’ll drink some beer and char some dead animal flesh.

Smash a button!

[Total: 7 Average: 5]