GNU/Linux Desktop Survival Guide by Graham Williams
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Installation Examples

20200101 Installation examples can provide guidance and confidence. Following are sample installations of GNU/Linux (typically Ubuntu) capturing various aspects of the installation and configuration.

The hardware specifications can be determined from the use of a variety of commands. The command hardinfo provides a comprehensive graphical interface to every aspect of the system. Command line tools can also be used, including dmesg, dmidecode, lspci and lshw, and files like /proc/cpuinfo. Here are some specific examples:

$ dmesg | grep "DMI:" | cut -c6- | cut -d" " -f 3- 		# Machine model

$ lscpu
$ cat /proc/cpuinfo | grep 'name'| uniq				# CPU
$ cat /proc/cpuinfo | grep process| wc -l			# Number of processors
$ wget -qO- https://www.cpubenchmark.net/laptop.html |		# PassMark
  grep i5-8365U | grep '<li' | perl -p -e 's|^.*prdname">||' |  #  Change CPU string here
  perl -pe 's|<.*count">| |' | perl -pe 's|<.*||' 		#  Removes the HTML markup
$ cat /proc/cpuinfo | grep bogomips				# BogoMIPS

$ sudo lshw -C memory | egrep '(size|description)'             	# Memory
$ cat /sys/block/nvme0n1/device/model           		# SSD Disk

$ sudo lshw -C network | egrep '(description|product|logical)' 	# Network
$ lspci -k | grep -EA3 'VGA|3D|Display'         		# Video
$ lspci -k | grep -EA3 -i 'audio'               		# Audio
$ dmesg | grep -i input | grep -i touchpad			# TouchPad
$ uname -r							# Kernel

Installation will usually begin by booting the computer from a bootable USB stick containing an image of the Ubuntu system. The required .iso file can be downloaded from https://ubuntu.com. Once downloaded, create a bootable USB using Make Startup Disk, otherwise known as the usb-creator-gtk. The image size for Ubuntu 19.10, for example, is 2.3GB.

The BogoMIPS measure reports the so-called bogus millions of instructions per second. The passmark metrics come from http://www.cpubenchmark.net.