Tag: system information

Get System Information With The ‘uname’ Command In Linux

Today we’ll be learning about a basic Linux command that’s known as ‘uname’ and it will be available in every Linux you are likely to touch. The uname command is one way to show some important system information in the Linux terminal.

You won’t even need to install anything. That’ll keep things easy and short!

The uname command stands for ‘Unix Name’ and is a part of ‘coreutils’, meaning it’s a default application included with Linux. If you’re using Linux, you almost certainly have the uname command available to you. I suppose someone might have stripped it out of an embedded system somewhere, but even that’s unlikely.

The uname command is used for displaying system information. It’s a bit limited in scope, but it still has useful information and the command is one you’ll see referenced often enough.

As I said, it’s a core utility in Linux. That means that uname is included with a bunch of other core utilities. If you want, you can easily check the man page with this command:

If you do that, you’ll see this:

uname – print system information

So, this command can and will show system information. That’d be what I told you it did in the first paragraph. I do my best to not steer you wrong and that’s exactly what we’ll do with this article.

So, let’s learn how to use the uname command in Linux:

Use The uname Command:

As mentioned above, you use the uname command in the terminal. That means you’ll need an open terminal. You can usually press CTRL + ALT + T to open your terminal. So, do that…

With your terminal open, you can just run uname in the terminal and it will tell you what sort of system you’re running. Try it…

It’ll happily spit out that you’re using Linux – if you are indeed using Linux.

It’ll also happily tell you the kernel name with the -s flag.

It should again spit out “Linux”, as that’s the kernel’s name.

If you want to know the kernel release information, use the -r flag.

Do you want to know if it’s 32 or 64-bit (or if it’s ARM? Try this command:

If you want to know the specific kernel version:

Then, you can learn the machine’s name with the -m flag.

You may just remember ‘mrs’ as that’s commonly  asked for in some support circles (and worth remembering):

There’s more to it but all you need to know is how to get all the information at once. That’s all you need to know. That’s just using the -a flag, like so:

You’ll get an output similar to this:

Which is quite a bit of system information and makes the uname command a useful command in and of itself. It’s an easy-to-remember command and one available in any Linux you’re likely to touch.

Closure:

I was a bit surprised that I’d never covered the uname command before. It’s a pretty basic command and so I’m surprised that I overlooked it. No worries. I’ve covered it now. There’s more to it but you’ll be fine with just the flags I mentioned.

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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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Get Some System Information With Archey

Today’s article will be a fun one, where we figure out how to get some system information with Archey. It’s a mostly unnecessary article and Archey is definitely replicating work done elsewhere, but it’ll be fun!

Well, I think it’ll be fun…

I suppose you can decide that for yourself as you read the article. If you want to get some system information with Archey, read on (and maybe have fun)!

As regular readers might know, I’ve covered a variety of *fetch articles.

How To: Display System Information With screenFetch
Screenfetch vs. Neofetch, You Decide!
Show RAM Information With Ramfetch
Get Some Prettified CPU Information in Your Terminal With ‘CPUFETCH’

In fact, the ‘Screenfetch vs. Neofetch’ article is oddly one of the most searched articles on the site, at least from Google’s traffic.

Anyhow, Archey is like those (but written in Python, if that matters). If I understand correctly, it was Archey4 – a maintained fork of Archey. The original Archey project ceased development and now this project is just called Archey as it is no longer a fork but is the actual project.

I think I’m understanding that properly. If I’m not, hopefully, someone chimes in and lets me know the full story. Often my articles are visited by project leaders, so maybe that’ll happen in this instance and someone will set the story straight.

Either way, it doesn’t matter much – but it does explain why I’m simply referring to the project as ‘Archey’. If you check the man page, you’ll learn that Archey describes itself like:

A simple system information tool written in Python

Got it? Good! Let’s get started getting some system information with Archey!

Let’s Get System Information With Archey:

So, the first thing you’re going to need is a copy of Archey. That’s easily accomplished if you want .deb or .rpm. There are some odds that you’ll find it’s already in your repositories (like Arch or BSD). You can also use “pip” (Python packages from PyPI) to install Archey. There’s even a ‘homebrew’ version for Mac users.

Otherwise, if none of those will work for you, you might find you need the source code to build and install Archey.

This link should take you to the current release:

https://github.com/HorlogeSkynet/archey4/releases/latest

From there you can install Archey. Due to the huge variety of installation methods, I’m just going to tell you to follow the directions to install Archey. If you can’t get it installed, you can always ask for help and someone will hopefully get you sorted.

Once you have Archy installed, you can start getting system information with Archey. You just run the archey command and it’ll spit out something like this:

Achey displays system information.
I don’t think you’ll need me to explain. The screenshot should be adequate.

As you can see, Archey’s output is fairly normal. It likely reminds you of things we’ve already covered in earlier articles. That’s okay – it should remind you of things like Screenfetch and Neofetch.

Just like some of the other previously covered *fetch applications, you can take a screenshot automatically. After all, the goal of these applications is to give you some information that si easily captured as a screenshot so that you can show it off to your forum buddies.

However, possibly because I have Flameshot installed (which seems to have taken over the ‘screenshot’ command that Archey uses), I am unable to actually verify the screenshot bit. I dutifully took the screenshot with Shutter. But, the -s flag should work for other people. I tried a few times with Archey but got conflicting errors. Someone smarter than I probably have this sorted out.

I’m not going to go uninstalling stuff just to demonstrate it. If it doesn’t work for you, file a bug at the above-linked GitHub site. Also, you have some additional options with Archey. There’s nothing too fancy, but be sure to check the man page (by using man archey) to learn more about the application.

Closure:

There you have it, you have another article. This article covers how to get system information with Archey. It’s an easy and, likely, familiar task. If you’ve followed along, you’ve learned all sorts of ways to get system information.

Do you really need Archey? No, probably not… I figured I’d cover it because my site shows up in some Archey queries. If people are looking for it, it might as well be here. That’s my line of thinking, at any rate.

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Check System Information With uname

In today’s article, we’re going to show you how to check system information with uname. This is a pretty handy command to have in your toolbox, and it’s really simple to use.

Once again, I’ll probably not cover every option, but only show you the commands I think you’ll find most useful. This should be both quick and easy enough for anyone to understand. Even a rank beginner should be able to follow along.

If you’ve ever asked a question on a forum, you may have been asked to show the output of the ‘uname -a‘ command. That’s a fine generic command to run, but you don’t have to output all that information. This could come in handy when you’re scripting and only need some of the information.

We’ll be using the uname command, as you might have guessed. According to the man page, the command defines itself as:

uname – print system information

That’s a pretty accurate definition and, sure enough, matches the headline and the introductory paragraph. Like I said, we’ll be collecting system information with uname. There’s not much more to it, so let’s just jump into the article.

Check System Information with uname:

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.

In it’s basic usage, the uname command can be run without any modifiers at all. To do so, simply type the following to get the system’s name:

The output of that will almost certainly just say ‘Linux’. Handy! 

Ah, but the uname command can do so much more. Want to know if you’re using 32 or 64 bit, the architecture? Easy enough, just use:

Would you like to use uname to check your kernel version? Try this command:

If you want to know your kernel release, that is the specific release you’re using at the moment, you need the -r flag. Try this:

Want to know the name of the network? Amazingly enough, that would require you using the -n flag. So it looks like:

Finally, as I mentioned in the intro, there’s the granddaddy of uname commands, which will output all the information you really need. Sure enough,  it’s accomplished with the -a flag:

As you can see, the flags mostly make sense for this command. Because of this, they should be easy to remember when you need to recall system information with the uname command. To see the complete manual, use the man uname command.

Closure:

Well, that’s yet another article. I hope you liked reading it as much as I enjoy typing these silly things out. It’s probably time to do a meta article soon – as I’m really itching to do so. There have been some pretty good changes. So, that’ll be a fun article to write and I may do so soon.

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Let’s Root Around In The /proc Directory

Today, we’re going to root around in the /proc directory. Why? So we can learn about our Linux system. See, there’s quite a bit of information hidden in there and I’m going to show you how to get it out of there. You’ll have to root around for it, as I’m not going to document every possible combination, but you’ll have the tools to do so.

We will be using the terminal for this, but we’ll only be using a couple of tools. The first tool we’ll use is the ‘ls’ command. We’ve used it before to sort files by time and sort files by size and even to show hidden files and folders. So, as you can guess, it’s a pretty handy command.

The other application we’ll be using is ‘cat’. We’ve used that less often, but we’ve used it before, but here’s a brief overview of the ‘cat’ command. You might want to read that. But, basically, we use the cat command to read files in the terminal. 

The ‘cat’ command is also a pretty handy command. You can try it out yourself. If we assume you’re using bash and have history enabled (the vast majority of Linux users) you can do something like:

That command should spit out the history of commands you’ve typed into the terminal. Perhaps some of ’em will have been things you learned right here on Linux-Tips! Well, maybe… I mean, people tell me they learn stuff here, though I’m never quite sure how! 😉 Anyhow…

So, this will be a fairly informal article. It should also be quick and easy. You’re welcome!

Rooting Around In The /proc Directory:

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.

Like I said, this is a fairly informal article. Quick and easy, right? Well, I’m going to show you everything you need to know in one command. Ready?

You’ll see a whole lot of files. What you want to do is use ‘cat’ on those files. Like, if you want to read/check your CPU information, you’d use:

Do you want to see the information the system has for your memory?

Not all the files have useful data, but some of them do. That’s why you’ve gotta root around in there. You’ve gotta learn which files contain which information – but I’ve given you a head start with two of them. You’re on a path of discovery, ’cause I’m surely not going to go through all of ’em to tell you what they do. I give you the tools, you do the work. Or something like that…

Closure:

See? Nice and easy, and very much an informal article. You can now root around in the /proc directory to get some system information. You may need elevated permissions to read some files, and some of them contain what’s pure gibberish to me. They might make more sense to you!

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.

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