Basic Computer and OS Information Using uname

Need a little information on the computer OS your using? uname is the perfect command for that. Lets say your installing some software on a friends computer that you know nothing about, or maybe your not sure if you need the 64 or 32 bit version of a program. The uname command can save the day.

By typing man uname you can read all about the options that can be used with this command. For the sake of simplicity and keeping this blog post short we're going to use the -a option. This is the all option and will give you just about all the information you would get from using the separate options. For instance, uname -p tells you your using a x86_64 bit processor. Now you know you can install that 64bit version of that software you wanted to install.

I Gimped the computer name for reasons of paranoia. This is the basic output from the uname -a command.

Here's the output I get from uname -a

Linux localhost.localdomain 3.14.8-200.fc20.x86_64 #1 SMP Mon Jun 16 21:57:53 UTC 2014 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux

This tells me that I'm running Linux, the name of the network node is localhost.localdomain very helpful when doing networking, I'm using 3.14.8.fc20.x86_64  which translates to kernel version 3.14.8 Fedoracore 20 x86_64  basically Fedora 20 64bit. I have no clue what #1 is ? Maybe one of the readers could leave a comment if you know? SMP is Symmetric multi-processing I'm pretty sure this means I'm running multiple processors, the date the kernel was compiled Mon Jun 16 21:57:53 UTC 2014, the system architecture x86_64, meaning its a 64 bit system in this case, and again x86_64 GNU/Linux operating system.

Thats a lot of information in a quick keystroke. The command comes in handy when working on unfamiliar systems, or when logged onto  a computer remotely. To find out more about uname try either man uname or uname --help.

Three Ways To Get Help From The Command Line

Most people that use Linux know about and use the man pages. If you're not familiar with man pages there pretty simple to use. Open up the terminal program of your choice, at the command prompt simply type man followed by the subject you want to learn about. For example:

man finger

By typing this at the command prompt man will pull up all the information on using finger. What it does, how it works, and how to use it. To close the particular man page just press the q key and the terminal will quit man and return you to the command prompt.

There's a man page for just about everything in Linux. Want to learn more about the unzip program in my last post. Type man unzip. When your done press the q key and it will return you to the command prompt.

O.K. most people know about man pages and if you didn't, well now you know. There is also a help command that does , you guessed it... helps.If you type help help at the command prompt it will bring up some info on using help. Use help when your not sure about what a command does. For example try this.

help pwd

This will pull up a little info on the pwd command. Help isn't as in depth or massive as the man pages, but from time to time when your stuck, sometimes help can really help.

Finally we have the info command. Want to learn more about using man pages, type info man. This will bring up, you guessed it ... info on man pages. Again just hit the q key to return to the command prompt.Here's some fun things to info

info vi
info bash

You get the point. These are three easy things you can do to get help directly from the command line. This can really save your life when your in a pinch. It can make for some dry reading but you'll be surprised at what you can learn from some of these man, info, and help pages.

Yum local install localinstall

So you downloaded an rpm and need to install it locally. Download the file. Move the file to wherever you want to place your rpm files. I simply named mine rpms. In terminal, cd to your rpm directory.

cd rpms

yum localinstall whatever_the_file_name_fc18.x86_64.rpm

This comes in handy when you don't want to install an entire repository that you probably only need one file from. The downside is you want to make sure you already have all the dependencies, otherwise you need to download them and install them as well.

CLI List All USB Devices From The Command Line

lsusb is a great command to list all the USB devices on your computer in Linux. If you have Linux-kernel-2.3.15 or newer just open up your favorite terminal program and type lsusb

lsusb -v is verbose
man lsusb man page