What is Snap Snap is a software packaging and deployment system (similar to deb) developed by Canonical for Linux. It has version control capabilities which help maintain multiple releases of a particular application (aka snaps). Though it is a proprietary solution from Canonical, Snap is available for other linux distros like Fedora, CentOS and Manjaro… Read More »
Grep Command Grep command in Linux is primarily used to search files for specific patterns of text, but there is a lot more it can do. The name “grep” is derived from the command used to perform a similar operation “ed” text editor with the operation: g/re/p ((globally search for a regular expression and print… Read More »
Routers are basically embedded devices (or system), and most modern routers run on linux. Think of it like a mini computer that has its own cpu, storage space, ram memory, ethernet ports, wifi chipset, and optionally a usb port. Functionally these are single board computers similar to a raspberry pi. They software that runs on… Read More »
Lets say you upgraded your home or office network with new wifi routers and devices then you should see if your devices are using the new wifi standards like Wifi5 or Wifi6, to ensure high speed data transfer. On Windows it is easy to check, but on linux we need to run a few commands… Read More »
On a linux system you can get details about the wifi adapter using commands like iw, iwconfig, iwlist, ethtool etc. However if you are a usb wifi adapter then it can be tricky. When you plug a usb wifi adapter on your system, linux will not show the details of the device in the lspci… Read More »
In this article we take a quick look at testing wifi throughput over lan using a simple tool called iperf. Wifi lan speed matters when you are transferring large files across devices. For example transferring a big video or zip file from ipad or smartphone to desktop pc connected on ethernet. Wifi speed is not… Read More »
After you install Ubuntu inside VirtualBox its necessary to install guest additions in order to enable enhanced features like native screen resolution, seamless windows, shared clipboard, shared folders and few others. Without it, you would probably have to work with a standard resolution like 1024×768 as the default virtual machine does not support every possible… Read More »
OpenVPN OpenVPN is open source, secure and robust. It is readily available for most platforms and can be setup quickly. The SurfShark native client also uses OpenVPN underneath. It supports both tcp and udp based wrappers for vpn traffic over internet. UDP is significantly faster than tcp and works really well. There are multiple ways… Read More »
DNS Leak DNS Leak is commonly seen in vpn connections, when all the http traffic goes through the vpn tunnel, however the dns queries go directly to system/isp dns servers bypassing the vpn tunnel, which breaks the privacy protection offered by the vpn. Unless dns leaks are fixed, you are not fully privacy guarded in… Read More »
The 7z LZMA benchmark runs dummy compression and decompression tasks to measure the overall performance of the system. It reports measurements in MIPS (million instructions per second) which give an idea of the computer’s raw processing power counting all factors. 7z LZMA compression is a multi-threaded work-load. This means that it can utilise multiple cores… Read More »
Sysbench is a command-line tool that is designed to test and benchmark database performance, but with certain options it can also be used to run tests to measure the raw performance of cpu, ram and storage devices as well. These tests can give a brief and fairly accurate assessment of the system’s performance. In this… Read More »
What are UEFI and BIOS These are specifications that describe and define how the system firmware should work to initialize the hardware and load the OS. In old systems we had the IBM PC “derived” BIOS implementations. Its the blue screen interface that you enter by pressing the Del/F2 keys just AFTER system power has… Read More »
In a pervious article we discussed about the important cpu performance metrics like usage, temperature, power and clock frequency. In this article we shall take a look at various methods of monitoring the same on Ubuntu or similar linux distros. There are quite a few commands on linux for monitoring cpu metrics. If you just… Read More »
So recently I was looking for a command to check the live power consumption of cpu in watts. I tried different commands like powertop, powerstat, lm-sensors but none of them worked properly. lm-sensors did show the temperatures of individual cores of the cpu, but could not display the watts being consumed in realtime. Other commands… Read More »
Encrypting a usb drive is an excellent idea for ensure that your data is safe and secure. If you are storing business data or any kind of personal sensitive information in a usb drive, its important to keep it safe it from hackers and snoopers. Or if you accidentally loose your usb drive then you… Read More »
Getting detailed information about the wifi adapter on a linux system is not straight forward using gui tools. However there are simple commands that can do the trick. In this article we shall take a look at commands like iwconfig, iwlist, iw and nmcli which can be used to probe details about the wifi adapter… Read More »
Xdebug is a powerful debugging and profiling tool for php that allows you to find and fix errors faster by showing the entire stack trace and source code file and line number. If you want your php development to be error free you should use something like xdebug right from the beginning. A very useful… Read More »
A lot of Intel processors like the i5-7400 have integrated gpus, that work quite well with Ubuntu and similar Linux systems using the open source drivers. Besides IGPU inside CPUs, there are even some motherboards that have IGPU in their chipsets. In this article we shall take a look at some of the commands that… Read More »
We often receive password encrypted pdfs on our mail from various places. When saving these pdfs locally its a good idea to get rid of the password, so that we don’t need to remember it later on. On Ubuntu there are many simple ways to remove the password of a pdf files, each with its… Read More »
Connecting apple devices like iphones and ipads to other platforms like windows or linux has never been easy, simply because apple’s ecosystem does not support anything outside of it. However recent models of ipads started supporting usb drives natively. That means you can now connect the usb drive to the ipad and read/write files to… Read More »