Apropos Tech Solutions Corp. Blog

Category: Linux

  • Linux: Lubuntu: system requirements

    Lubuntu is a lightweight Linux distribution. What exactly are its requirements?

    The following is my understanding.

    I’ve loaded Lubuntu on numerous computers. To my knowledge, it’s got everything a user would typically need. One of my “daily driver” PCs is Lubuntu.

    Lubuntu, it seems, has the following basic requirements: 1GB Ram, 1GHz speed, and 10GB hard drive. Yet, 2-4 GB Ram, 2GHz speed with dual-core, and 20GB is recommended.

    Right now I’m running a fresh install of Lubuntu, with no user-created files as of yet.

    For this PC, the CPU max speed 2.6GHz, with five cores: 2C+3G. df -h suggests the installation is 8.1GB, while free -h suggests RAM usage of 1.8Gi, with another 2.4Gi used for caching. (1Gi ≈ 1.07G)

    This PC is from 2017, but on Lubuntu it’s as zippy as one of the i5 PCs I use, from 2022, that are running Windows 11.

    Source:

    lubuntu.me

    invgate.com

    stackoverflow.com

    techpowerup.com

    -js

  • Linux: how to get system specs from terminal

    Examining a Linux system, one might wonder about the computer it’s installed on.

    The following is by my understanding.

    In Linux, to find system information from the terminal, one might use the following commands:

    free -h, to find the RAM

    df -h, to find disk/storage capacity

    lscpu, to find CPU info (speed, cores, model, etc)

    Source:

    man7.org: lscpu

    man7.org: free

    linux.die.net: df

    -js

  • Web, Linux: lightweight browsers, part0

    Especially with Linux on an old computer, one might seek a lightweight browser.

    The following is by my understanding.

    I loaded Lubuntu onto a Vista-era computer two days back; perhaps I will mention more about that in another post. However, for earlier mention of Lubuntu, there is my post from June 19, 2026.

    Lubuntu comes with Firefox. On this Vista-era computer, which runs Lubuntu fine, Firefox takes a few seconds, after clicking, to load, but it does. However, a given web page might take a good deal longer to load – perhaps ten seconds or much more.

    I looked into lightweight browsers and loaded Falkon. While I was impressed with its minimal design, the web pages didn’t seem to load faster on it. Falkon seemed to work about as well as Firefox.

    It seems to me that a lightweight browser won’t solve the problem of navigating the web on a slow computer, because the web pages typically use a lot more resources than the browser itself does. High-resolution images and JavaScript, both on the page itself and in subframes, can easily bog down an old computer.

    -js

  • Linux: grep, part0

    The grep command is a Linux shell one for finding strings.

    The following is by my understanding.

    The grep command is used to find a string and will print out each line that contains it.

    grep “log” a-file.txt

    will print, to terminal, each line from a-file.txt that contains the string “log”.

    grep log a-file.txt

    seems to work the same as if “log” is in quotes.

    The grep command can be used with regular expressions. For example,

    grep -E gre”e|a”t a-file.txt

    will find “great” or “greet” in a-file.txt. The -E switch means you don’t need to escape the | operator.

    Source:

    linux.die.net

    -JS

  • Linux terminal commands: showing non-match

    Sometimes you want to weed out the “cannots.”

    The following is as I recall it.

    Yesterday I was in a server file system using the Linux terminal. I wanted to know about the folders the terminal could access, not the ones it couldn’t. Yet, there were more it couldn’t.

    I pipelined the command into grep:

    command | grep -v “cannot”

    but it was still showing the “cannot” lines.

    I learned from another source that the reason is grep only works on standard output, file handle 1 in the terminal, whereas “cannot” typically will come from standard error, file handle 2.

    When I tried

    command 2>&1 | grep -v cannot

    I got what I was hoping for. Apparently 2>&1 feeds standard error into standard output, so grep can work on it.

    Interesting, eh?

    Source:

    stackoverflow.com

    man7.org

    -JS