Useful Terminal Commands For Distro-Hoppers

so I love spending time at the terminal I often tend to do things at the command line more than using gooey tools because graphical tools well they can be useful sometimes a lot of times I just find it a lot quicker and easier to do things at the command line inside a terminal and one of the things you guys have probably noticed is when I do any kind of drro reviews Dro first looks anytime I drro hop on physical equipment even forget the stuff I do on camera the stuff I do off camera there's certain commands that I find very useful when I'm first checking out a brand new Dro or a brand new release of a drro so I wanted to cover some of that on camera today so let me switch over to my desktop and I'm going to go ahead and open a terminal and let me Zoom way in you guys see me run a lot of the same commands on video when I'm checking out new Dro releases I'm going to share you know some of the common commands that you often see me run the most obvious one you one of the things I immediately want to know about a Linux syro especially if uh I didn't read it in the release notes I usually want to know what kernel it's running I want to know the kernel version I want to know if it's a upto-date kernel I also just want to know if it's the standard generic kernel which in this case I'm on the the regular kernel or if it's a LTS kernel or maybe a Zen kernel whatever kernel you know I want to know what the kernel version is and that way if it's for example I prefer to could be a LTS kernel user or a Zen kernel user you know in this case if it was using the generic kernel I know to go install the kernel I want to use another cool command you can run especially when you're trying out new dros maybe you're not sure what the drro version number is what the code name is you can actually do this command here the LSB relase command give it the dash a flag and that will actually give you some information about what you're currently running as far as your l distribution you can see in this case I'm running Arco Linux the release is just rolling it's a rolling release there's no release versions but if you had a uh static release drro typically you get the version number you'd also get whatever code name is appropriate for that version number as well on my drro first look videos typically I want to know how many programs are installed on the dro that gives me an idea whether the drro is a more minimal drro it has a very few packages installed or maybe it's a little bit more heavy or bloated because it has a lot of packages installed and there's various commands you can run to actually check the package count on an arch based distribution you would run Pacman D capital Q lowercase q and if I do that that gives me a list of all the packages that are installed on my Arch based system line by line and anytime you get a package list of the packages installed line by line all you need to do is then pipe it into the WC command give it DHL for the flag so WC is the word count program it gives you a word count by default but if you give it the- l flag it gives you the line count and in this case the number of lines in the output of this Pac-Man dqq command will tell me the number of packages that are installed via Pac-Man and you can see on my system I have 1,979 packages installed these are native packages installed through the Pac-Man package manager now of course this only works on Arch based systems that use the Pacman package manager but most of the big Linux package managers have a way to list the number of packages installed or the packages installed in a line by line list so on Debian and auntu based distributions of course they use the APT package manager this command here appt space list space-- installed will give you a list line by line of all the packages installed and once again you would just pipe that into wc- L if you're on a fedora based distrib any RPM distribution that uses dnf you could do dnf list installed so no dash dash in this case just dnf list installed and then pipe that into wc- L they all give you the same kind of output that you saw from my pcman command here one of the most useful commands and one of the ones I use all the time on my videos when I'm checking out a new distribution is the where is command sometimes I just want to know if a certain program is installed Because unless it was somewhere in the release notes I may not know a certain program is installed or not on this particular Linux distribution now these days pipe wire is often installed on most distributions but there for a while when was there was some uncertainty whether a distro might be defaulting to pipewire as its audio server or not you know I could do a simple where is pipe wire and if pipe wire is installed what the where is command does it gives you the location to the binary it also gives you a location to any configuration files such as you know Etsy and user share gives you the location to the man page as well but if the binary is present so if user bin name of program is present then that program is installed so that lets me know pipewire is installed and is the audio server on this system if it wasn't installed I wouldn't get any output here some of the common things that I will often wear is on a new Linux distribution not just on my videos but when I install them on physical Hardware if I'm not sure for example do they install flat pack out of the box where is flat pack user bin flat pack is here so flat pack is installed on this system sometimes I will also check if Snaps are available especially if it's a auntu based distribution so I'll do a where is snapd you can see that snapd I got user lib snapd and user share snapd here so is snaps actually available on my system if I do a snap list uh nothing happens so Snaps are actually not here there's some leftover information some libraries here but the snapd binary is not here of course I could actually do a search with the Pacman QQ command remember it lists all the packages installed well then I could search for the package I could grip for snapd snapd is here but those are where is commands I will often use where is flat pack where is snapd uh and then I will do a flat pack list to see if flat packs are installed out of the box you know and it will tell me exactly which ones are here flat pack list you can see on my system there's a few flat packs installed there's also a few snaps installed on my system as well but you can see the snap list command was not working for me probably just I I updated the system probably haven't rebooted I may need to actually reboot this machine soon some other things I will sometimes do sometimes I don't know if it's using uh whand or X11 especially if it's a A system that has both xorg and Wayland support well a easy way to find this is do a echo and then dollar sign xdg session type all caps so xdg session type that's an environment variable and what this does is if you Echo that whatever it prints out it's going to print out X1 or whand and that will tell you whether your desktop environment or window manager is currently using X11 or whand for example these days plasma KD plasma most dros do default to using Wayland but some don't some actually still use X11 out of the box I guess for better support so sometimes I'll just Echo that Command right that that environment variable just to see what they're defaulting to for their plasma session for example also sometimes I want to know what the default user shell on the system is some dros most dros will default to bash but a lot of dros install more exotic shells like zsh or fish or whatever you know so I want to know what their default user shell is so I will Echo shell all caps and in my case you can see my user shell is his by default is SLB slf fish now there's a few different ways you could actually get this shell information uh a easy way is to just cat the/ etcp passwd file and then that gives you a list of all the users on the system that's what this file contains it's a list of all the users on the system for example the root user the bin user the Damon user the mail user yada yada yada but anyway go through the list and find your username for example my username of course is DT typically your default uh home user his ID will be 1,000 and then you get the location to his home directory slome DT in my case and his default Shi /b/ fish again in my case and if you didn't want to actually look for your username in that you could just grab grip that information I could grip for example DT and to grip out that one line for that specific user that I was looking for now there's a lot of environment variables on your system it's not just shell it's not just xdg session type there's a lot of these things that you could Echo out to get their value and if you're unsure about all the environment variables there's a command you could do a print EnV print environment and you can see these are the environment variables on my system here that have actually been set to something for example the browser environment variable defaults to Firefox even though I use Brave as my main browser the default I guess browser will open as Firefox some of the other useful environment variables editor all caps you can see I use emac client as my editor you also have uh LC C type LC time you know some of this stuff as far as your local information you typically don't want to play with those values but if you're doing a like a command line installation of certain Linux dists like Arch or Gen 2 or things like that you know where you you have to start really from the ground up and kind of make your Linux distribution sometimes you may have to set some of those values on your own now sometimes you will do an automatic installation of a Linux distribution so maybe the distribution is a BTU which has a very easy graphical installer that you hit okay three times and then you're done or all the arch based distributions that use the calaris installer again you hit okay three or four times and your you're done in like 10 minutes but you really don't know what the distribution did you don't know what kind of partition scheme it used you don't know what file system type typically it used out of the box you can get some of this information with the lsdl command so list block is this command it lists all your block devices your drives so I can see exactly what it did with the partitions in this case this is my actual host machine here my main workstation here which has 1 2 3 four five different drives and a couple of different partitions on some drives it doesn't give me the file system information on that but you can tack on dasf to the LSB command and it will actually tell you the file system that these partitioned drives are uh partitioned to you can see I'm actually defaulting to using extend four as the file system on this particular drive here SDA and also on my nvme drive as well some other useful commands especially on a uh Linux distribution not just when you're first checking it out but actually going forward you know just managing your existing Linux distribution htop is one I will use to see you know what processes are running to see which processes are sucking up a lot of CPU or memory especially if something seems a little weird on the computer I can go find the process that's taking up all that RAM for example and then kill it inside htop uh if htop is installed if htop is not installed I would just install htop but if you don't have htop installed you could use the regular top command as well you could also use the PS command for listing your processes you could do something like PS and then give it these um options aux and that gives you a list of processes that are running as well once you have the uh process ID for you know a particular process you want to kill you could kill it with you know the ID of that process or if it's the program name you could kill all for example I could kill all email right now it would kill all my emac windows as well as the emac Damon that's running in the background I'm actually using emac on a different monitor right now so I'm not going to kill all emac but I could do that if I needed to to get rid of some processes maybe some processes that were a little out of control so those are a few of the common commands I will use when I'm taking a look at especially a new distribution maybe something I just hopped to or I'm taking a quick look at a ISO on camera for video or whatever I didn't cover a lot of commands for actually in installing Linux like through the command line for example if you needed to manually partition your own drives most Linux distributions have installers that will partition the disc for you but if you needed to do it manually you would use either the F dis program or maybe the CF disk program now I have actually done videos about both of these programs in the past go check those videos because they're a little bit more detailed for me to cover right here they deserve their own videos and again I've done videos on F disc and CF disc in the past and beyond that you know things like you know the tro command and you know setting local and time zone information and things like that that's a little bit more deep most of those commands I shouldn't really have to cover on a video like this those are for people trying to install distributions like Arch Linux or Gen 2 anything that requires a command line installation and typically those kinds of distributions come with a Wiki they come with a very easy to follow and easy to read installation guide and they give you line by line the commands to enter at the terminal so you know a lot of that stuff you know I for new users may seem difficult but I promise you it's not these commands once you get used to them they're actually rather easy to remember and to reuse over and over again and it gets to the point where you may be like me and you start feeling more comfortable at the terminal than trying to go and get that information from whatever graphical program may or may not be on your system that could also give you that same information now before I go I need to thank a few special people I need to thank the producers of this episode and of course I'm talking about Matt Steve armor Dragon cap caveman dof deist George Lee methos Arion Paul P AR VOR reality for Less red profit Roland waru and abtu and Willie these guys they are my highest tiered patrons over on patreon without these guys this quick list of various terminal commands I find useful especially when I'm drro hopping this video wouldn't have been possible the video also would not have been possible without each and every one of these fine ladies and gentlemen all these names you're seeing on the screen these are all my supporters over on patreon because I don't have any corporate sponsors I'm sponsored by you guys the community if you like my work want to see more videos about Linux and free and open source software subscribe to Dro tube over on patreon peace guys