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 »
In a previous post we already discussed about UEFI and BIOS and how the boot process work with each of them. Now in this post we shall take a look at the partition table formats, namely MBR and GPT. They basically define data structure formats that hold partition information on the drive. Without the partition… 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 »
“ls” (list directory contents) is one of the most commonly used commands in Linux. The command displays a list of all the files and directories in the current directory. It is one of the very first commands one should learn when new to Linux. The command is quite popular, works well enough, and can be… Read More »
Sysbench is a command line utility program available on linux that can be used to conduct different types of benchmark tests to measure performance of disk io, memory, cpu and mysql database. In another article we learned how to use sysbench to . In this particular article we take a quick look at how we… Read More »
Tcpdump is a command-line tool for capturing and analyzing network packets in Linux. Basically its a packet sniffer that also breaks them down into easy to read format for human beings. It can be a powerful tool for troubleshooting network connectivity issues by analyzing the network traffic on a system. Tcpdump works by listening for… Read More »
USB ports and devices come in a variety of speeds like USB 2.0 (480 Mbps), USB 3.0 ( 5 Gbps), USB 3.2 Gen 2 (10 Gbps) and so on. When you connect a device to your system on a usb port for the purpose of data transfer (for example an external ssd or hdd) you… Read More »
Qemu+kvm is an excellent free virtualisation solution for linux host systems. It can run any gui operating system pretty much like virtualbox or vmware. KVM provides virtualised access to cpu and memory whereas qemu emulates other hardware components like disk drives. Together they provide a complete solution to launch a virtual machine that a user… Read More »
Wget Command ‘Wget’ is developed as a part of the GNU Project. You can use it to download/extract data and content from web servers. Its name is a combination of the “www” and the word get. It supports downloading over multiple protocols like FTP, SFTP, HTTP and HTTPS. Wget is written in c and can… Read More »
Have you ever tried using Linux in Windows? If you do, then you need to use virtualization. Alternatively, you can do a dual-boot, which lets you use only one operating system at a time. Meet Windows Subsystem for Linux. This new Windows feature lets you access Linux directly from Windows. In this article, we’ll go… Read More »