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David Both
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Linux Storage Management Tools

GUI disk usage analyzers in Linux

For people who prefer visual representations, these GUI-based tools help you understand how your storage capacity is used.

Sometimes the visual representation of disk utilization is easier or newer users may not be as familiar with the various Linux commands that display storage information. I am a person who comprehends visual representations more easily than the printout on the command line.

Don Watkins
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Linux Swap System Administration zram

How to remove existing traditional swap partitions

Swap space is a common and important aspect of computing today regardless of operating system. Linux uses swap space to substitute for RAM when it becomes too full to effectively support additional programs or data. It is a way to temporarily enable the system to keep running albeit at the cost of reduced performance. However the use of zram for swap space has provided an interesting, if counter-intuitive, method for providing a reasonable amount of swap space while significantly improving swap performance.

David Both
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Command Line Linux System Administration Terminal

Getting started on the command line

As a SysAdmin, the Linux command line is typically my happy place. The command line interface, the CLI, is the closest I can get to the raw power of my computers. It gives me access to tools that make my work easy, fast, and even fun. I use the command line so much that I sometimes forget how much power I have to manage my computers.

I also forget that it took me a long time to really understand the terminology that applies to the various tools that I use to access that command line. This article is about those tools and the sometimes confusing terminology necessary to function on the CLI.

David Both
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Linux

How to use the basename command

The basename command is a GNU core utility for UNIX and UNIX-like systems, and is designed to remove the file suffix and leading directories from a filename. It’s a reasonable alternative to at least some uses of the cut command. You’re not likely to use it alone, but it’s an interesting tool to have available to you when constructing a complex command.

Seth Kenlon
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Data Streams Linux Linux Philosophy

The Linux Philosophy for SysAdmins, Tenet 01 — Data Streams, the universal interface

Everything in Linux revolves around streams of data – particularly text streams.

I recently Googled “data stream” and most of the top hits are concerned with processing huge amounts of streaming data in single entities such as streaming video and audio, or financial institutions processing streams consisting of huge numbers of individual transactions. This is not what we are talking about here although the concept is the same and a case could be made that current applications use the stream processing functions of Linux as the model for processing many types of data.

David Both
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