shredder12 Blogs

Use free with '-s' option to get a continuous update of memory usage info

Written on April 14th, 2011 at 00:57 am by shredder12

Free command gives a concise information of the memory usage of the system. The program displays the info once and exits. You can use the ‘-s’ option to update the output continuously. Unlike top command, free doesn’t use ncurses, hence instead of a page refresh emulation its simply continuous printing. But it sure does the job.

How to: Get the information of your Computer's Hardware components using Dmidecode command

Written on April 12th, 2011 at 18:27 pm by shredder12

Dmideocde is a wonderful utility to get detailed information about your system’s hardware components. It extracts the information from the computer’s Desktop Management Interface(DMI) and displays in a human readable format. Please note that, it doesn’t probe the devices in order to gather the information, it just reads it from some data structures.

The history of the origin of grep command

Written on April 5th, 2011 at 22:44 pm by shredder12

Grep is one of the most important tools for a shell user. When it comes to retrieving required data from a bulk of text, grep is your best bet. Its very flexible, powerful and as I came to know today, has an interesting story too.

It all started a long time ago. With the increasing popularity of regular expressions, the text editor “ed” included a functionality using which one can print the lines, in the currently edited file, which matches a regular expression.

SuperTuxKart 0.7.1 hits Release Candiadate

Written on April 5th, 2011 at 01:43 am by shredder12

The release candidate of the upcoming release of SuperTuxkart, version 0.7.1, is available for download. The RC brings some significant changes from the version 0.7, released last december. The additions include - particle and weather affects, a smoother multi player setup, new shiny suburbs track, many tracks have been renamed and a lot more small changes and bug fixes.

Howto: Find the uptime and system load of a Linux machine using uptime command

Written on March 31st, 2011 at 16:45 pm by shredder12

Uptime is the amount of time a machine has been up and running, providing all its services without any downtime. For a linux machine, this information can be found out using the “uptime” command. Along with the uptime, this command also tells you how many users are currently logged in and the load on the system in the past 1, 5 and 15 minutes.

About:me Firefox addon - View a visual pattern of your Internet activities

Written on April 13th, 2011 at 01:01 am by shredder12

So, after the about:memory url, I started looking for more about: URI scheme options in Firefox and came across an addon which adds an “about:me” URL. This addon, "about:me", makes use of the browsing and downloading history data to give our browser usage pattern a visual representation through graphs and pie charts. Its actually pretty good. You can see a list of most visited websites, your hourly browsing pattern, kind of files you have downloaded and daily download pattern too.

How to precisely find the amount of memory or RAM being used by Firefox

Written on April 10th, 2011 at 20:26 pm by shredder12

Until today, I relied on system monitor & top to find out the amount of memory being used by firefox. This works fine but there is an even better way to find out the exact amount used by the browser. Visit about:memory page to find it out.

How to remove or uninstall Nouveau drivers from Ubuntu

Written on April 5th, 2011 at 12:44 pm by shredder12

So, I blew my Graphic card today  and while troubleshooting the issue I tried to install proprietary Nvidia drivers. But in order to do that you are required to remove nouveau drivers from the system. This guide will tell you how to disable and remove nouveau drivers step by step.

Correct your habit of incorrectly typing "ls" using the program "sl"

Written on April 4th, 2011 at 23:25 pm by shredder12

Almost everyone of us would have made the mistake of incorrectly typing “sl” or “LS” instead of a simple “ls”. Seriously! how difficult could it be to type those two letters? But we keep making the same mistake over and over. In order to correct this problem, there is a wonderful program name “sl”. It shows a small animation of a steam locomotive(abbr. sl) every time we type “sl” or “LS”.

Use the lscpu command to get CPU/Processor information on Linux

Written on March 20th, 2011 at 20:37 pm by shredder12

There are a lot of ways to get information about your system’s cpu. You can either dump the contents of /proc/cpuinfo file, lshw or my recent discovery "lscpu". This utility gathers all the data from sysfs, /proc/cpuinfo file as well and shows it in a human readable format.