Useful Linux commands for querying your computer for hardware information.

The iostatcommand is another good way to get information about the hardware in your computer. This command displays information about the average CPU usage as well as reads and writes to your hard disk partitions. To install this utility, run this command. ubuntu ~ $ sudo apt-get install sysstatubuntu ~ $ sudo apt-get install sysstat … Read more

Different ways to get user and system information on Linux.

The who command on Linux and UNIX systems will list all currently logged in users on your system. jason@darknet:~$ who -Htu NAME LINE TIME IDLE PID COMMENT jason :0 2016-02-13 13:43 ? 1895 (:0) jason tty2 2016-02-13 13:43 00:01 2164 jason pts/0 2016-02-13 13:43 . 2178 (:0.0)jason@darknet:~$ who -Htu NAME LINE TIME IDLE PID COMMENT … Read more

How I fixed the Java out of memory issue on an Amazon AWS instance.

I was trying to get openmeetings working on an Amazon AWS instance today and I kept getting Java out of memory errors. I fixed this with this simple solution I found: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/18078859/java-run-out-of-memory-issue. This fixed my problem and allowed the java application to start with a limited amount of memory. Try this out if you have … Read more

Useful commands for getting information about your computers memory status and hard drives.

This command used with grep will return information about your computers memory. jason@jason-desktop:~/Documents$ cat /proc/meminfo | grep Total MemTotal: 12219468 kB SwapTotal: 70311928 kB VmallocTotal: 34359738367 kB CmaTotal: 0 kB HugePages_Total: 0jason@jason-desktop:~/Documents$ cat /proc/meminfo | grep Total MemTotal: 12219468 kB SwapTotal: 70311928 kB VmallocTotal: 34359738367 kB CmaTotal: 0 kB HugePages_Total: 0 If you want to … Read more

Some interesting facts about computing history. The early days.

The computers of old did not use modern microchip Random Access Memory as we do today; one method of storing data temporarily was with the use of magnetic core memory. This involves tiny rings of magnetized iron threaded onto a wire mat, this was expensive to make; but it had a good access time and … Read more

Fedora Core 17 not polished enough and mobile computing revolution taking over from desktop computers?

I have abandoned the Fedora Core 17 distribution, the me-tv software is not available and I could not get the source code to compile. That program worked perfectly on Linux Mint 12, but when I installed the Linux Mint 13 distribution it would not work properly at all. Presently I have finished installing Ubuntu 11.04 … Read more

The old computers that led us into the computing revolution. The 10,000 dollar PDP-8.

This is the PDP-8 computer. This beast had 4 Kilobytes of RAM and was quite the purchase back in the day. You could program in FORTRAN on this machine, entering code with a teletype input. The more powerful PDP-9 had twice the RAM, 8 Kilobytes to be precise and cost only 35,000 dollars. But with … Read more