Introduction This article will explore the ‘lsblk’ command to understand the structure of storage devices through practical examples with filtering options. This will help you manage, monitor, analyze, and troubleshoot block devices on a Linux system. Block devices are storage devices that store and retrieve data in fixed-size blocks. Installation To install ‘lsblk’, you can… Read More »
Linux-based operating systems adhere to the Linux Filesystem Hierarchy Standard (FHS), a well-defined directory structure maintained by the Linux Foundation. This standardization brings several benefits, including ease of use for both users and software developers by providing a consistent location for installed binaries, system files, and system information. While transitioning from Windows to Linux, users… Read More »
Intel Quick Sync Video is the technology used in intel integrated gpu’s to enable hardware accelerated encoding and decoding of videos. It supports multiple codecs like H.264(avc), H.265 (hevc), MPEG-2 etc. In this quick tutorial we take a quick look at how to use this technology inside ffmpeg to encode and decode videos. Install non-free… Read More »
Iotop is an open-source and free utility Linux command used to display the statistics of disk input/output by processor/threads and print the summary which gets refreshed every second. It is quite similar to the top command, except that iotop monitors just disk i/o and not other metrics. This command is particularly useful for system administrators… Read More »
sar (System Activity Reporter) is a command line tool used to collect, report, and analyze system activity information in Linux and other Unix-based operating systems. In other words, it gathers information and provides insights on system activity, such as CPU utilization, memory usage, I/O operations, network activity, disk usage, power management, and much more, which… Read More »
In another article, we learned the basic docker commands like how to launch a container and connect to it via terminal and run commands. We saw that a basic docker image like “ubuntu” does not have commands like ifconfig, ip, and ping installed by default and we could install them with the apt command. But… Read More »
RAM Speed (read and write) is crucial to the overall performance of the system. Having a fast cpu but slow ram can slow down a system in demanding work-loads like video editing and gaming. Ram size and speed are different factors. Ram size determines how much data can be stored in the system, whereas the… Read More »
The name of the nslookup command is an abbreviated version of “name server lookup”. nslookup sends a request to the local domain name system (DNS) server asking for information from its DNS records. In response, the DNS server returns the IP address or relevant domain information for a specific website or server. However, it can… Read More »
Multipass is a lightweight, command-line virtualization tool developed by Canonical that allows you to create and manage Ubuntu virtual machines (VM) on your local machine. It lets you run multiple isolated instances of Ubuntu for development and testing. Multipass is cross-platform, which means you can run it on macOS, Windows, and Linux. However, on Linux,… Read More »
Docker is a popular “containerization” platform that allows developers to run applications inside isolated environments called containers. Containers are similar to virtual machines, however they do not run an entire operating system (like virtualbox, qemu). In principle containers are somewhat similar to the classic that could be used to setup a completely isolated environment within… Read More »
OpenCL is a general purpose computing api that is designed to be hardware accelerated with a supporting gpu and driver. On Linux this api is supported by all major gpu vendors including nvidia, intel and amd. In this quick tutorial we take a look at how to check if your system support opencl api (with… Read More »
Disk I/O speed is an indicator of how fast the system and read/write to the disk. Usually nvme ssds are the fastest and hard drives and external usb flash drives are the slowest. There are many commands that can be used to benchmark the performance of storage disks on linux. For e.g. sysbench, dd and… Read More »
Switch to better DNS servers Switch to better dns servers like google dns or open dns. I personally use google dns servers: 8.8.8.8 , 8.8.4.4 Right click on the network management icon on the system tray and “Configure Network Connections”. Go to IPv4 tab and enter the dns servers as shown below. You can also… Read More »
Qemu(+KVM) is a powerful virtualization solution for linux oses. KVM (Kernel based Virtual Machine) is a module built into the linux kernel that provides it virtualization capabilities. Qemu is a hardware emulator that uses kvm to provides all necessary features to create and launch virtual machines with guest operating systems. The other more commonly used… Read More »
Vulkan API is the successor of OpenGL the cross platform api standard for hardware accelerated 3D graphics. It is a cross platform alternative to DirectX which is windows specific only. All major gpu vendors including nvidia, amd and intel provide vulkan support either through their own drivers or via the Mesa graphics library. In this… Read More »
The decode-dimms program from i2c-tools package can be used to extract spd information from the ram modules which provides details about the module including the timings, clock speed, internal layout of the memory blocks including rank and bank count. The command can be installed with the following commands: sudo apt-get install i2c-tools sudo modprobe eeprom… Read More »
So you have downloaded an iso which could be a linux installation or live iso or a windows iso or something other operating system. Now if you are planning to burn it to an actual disk like a cd or dvd, it would be a nice idea to first check if the iso if properly… Read More »
IndigoBench IndigoBench is a free and simple tool from Indigo Renderer that uses OpenCL api based library to render graphics using gpu acceleration. It renders an image and then calculates a score based on the performance. This score can be compared with other users in their online benchmark database. This tool is very simple and… Read More »
Kubuntu / Ubuntu 23.04 I am running Kubuntu 23.04 with Plasma desktop. You can check your ubuntu version with the lsb_release command: silver@ubuntussd:~$ lsb_release -a No LSB modules are available. Distributor ID: Ubuntu Description: Ubuntu 23.04 Release: 23.04 Codename: lunar silver@ubuntussd:~$ The interesting thing this time is that kubuntu has been installed on an external… Read More »
Un-allocated space is that disk space which is not inside any partition and is lying free. This space cannot be formatted to a file-system without first creating a partition in it. In order to use the space in unallocated space, you must either create a new partition in that space, or merge the space with… Read More »