If you have had any experience with administering a UNIX or Linux system, even for personal use, then I’m sure you’ll laugh out loud at some of these hilarious new UNIX commands! (obviously not real commands, the site is just for laughs)
Recently I did a friend a favour and installed Linux Mint on her laptop as she was a bit frustrated with Windows. Unfortunately I assumed she’d backed up everything before handing it over to me, so I re-partitioned the whole drive to ext4. She hadn’t.
On the bright side the computer was quite new and the only thing she wanted from the disk were some photos she’d taken. Well, that just made it my lucky day because there just happens to be a tool specifically for recovering photos (and a myriad of other filetypes) from disks that have been written over: TestDisk
After my previous post about checking computer specs in Linux somebody asked an interesting question: how do you check your computer’s specifications if you don’t actually have any operating system to check them with?
In my opinion the easiest way to do this would be to download a disk image of a live CD for a lightweight Linux distribution, such as my favourite: ArchLinux. Once you’ve burned it to a disc you can put it in your computer and boot directly from the disc. ArchLinux is light and fast and will allow you to log in as root with command line access, where you will be able to run the commands I talked about in my other post to find your computer specs even for a computer with no OS or in other cases, for example where you don’t have permission to check with the current OS. If you’re not familiar with Linux don’t worry, follow the on-screen instructions and just type the commands I described. When you’re done checking you can turn off the computer and take out the CD and things will be just as they were before.
❗ Note: automated script downloadable at the bottom of this post!
Something you always want to do on a computer, even if only once, is to check its hardware specifications, that is:
Of course most modern GNU/Linux desktop environments like Ubuntu usually come with some kind of graphical tool to find this information. GNOME’s System Monitor program should provide at least some of what you’re looking for. The information here is more for when you’re staring at a blinking cursor on a black screen trying to remember what the command was to show information about the CPU, RAM or Graphics Card.
This is the third time I’ve had to go on an internet search quest to remind myself how to do this in a Linux terminal. To save myself the trouble in the future, I’m writing down the commands here and if anyone else finds it useful then that’s great, and a second bird is figuratively killed!
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You can look down on the idea of it all you want but command-line games have their place. Not only are there situations where you need them but in a way, not having any graphics sometimes allows them to focus on other aspects of gameplay that makes them better. I was installing a new operating system on my computer today but I messed up somewhere and ended up with no Desktop Environment. Imagine turning on your computer one day and where you usually get:
“Hi, welcome to your computer [insert lots of fancy graphics and stuff], please pick who you want to log in as and I’ll give you a desktop with buttons and icons that will show you programs in little windows and let you click on things to do stuff.”
you now instead get this: Continue reading