Ubuntu Arizona LoCo Team

12.04 has served me well and very soon the new LTS arrives. I am not brave enough for the beta release but it has been said it is far more quicker than 13.10. The sad news is that Mir (replacement for X11) will be not standard in Trusty but it will be in the repos if you wish to give it a spin. I decided to further the cause of ubuntu by introducing a set of videos from my You Tube friend. “jthelinuxguy” has given his blessing to share these.

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCxQKHvKbmSzGMvUrVtJYnUA

Linux for Beginners is a great primer to the command line interface. There is other subjects are covered that might be just as interesting. Enough for now and my welcome to our new members.

Windows 8.1/Ubuntu13.10 UEFI, secure boot dual-boot installation instructions provided by wmack
Generic Box with MSIFM2-A75MA-E35 A75 FM2 R mother board
and a AMD A4-5300 3.4G CPU 4GB ram 500gb HDD

Prerequisites
System with an installed Windows 8.1
Boot is set to use UEFI and secure boot
Ubuntu 13.10 USB, created with startup disk creator in an Ubuntu 13.10 system

Procedure
Start up PC and boot into Windows 8.1
Shut down PC, using this procedure: use keyboard super-x combination to bring up menu. From there select to shut down. I was told that this does a complete shutdown, and not a half-baked one.
While shut down, insert Ubuntu USB
get into UEFI and select usb stick as the first item in the UEFI boot priority
have system booted
in Ubuntu menu select “Install Ubuntu”
Go through menus until you are at the “installation type” menu
in my case the Windows install was not recognized. Others have reported that there is a choice to “install ubuntu and windows side by side.” So if you see the side-by-side option you have to make a decision: continue with these instructions, or trust the ubuntu installer…
select “Something else” from the installation type menu, then
verify that the efi partition is mounted as “EFI boot partition”
shrink the largest partition (where Windows has its data – presumably)
I went from 481G to 150G
add 10G of swap partition
add remaining large free space as ext4, use as root dir. Make sure it is marked for formatting
Let Ubuntu installation take its course
After ubuntu install is complete, on reboot, break into UEFI
Make sure that Ubuntu is the first choice in the UEFI boot order
let boot up continue. You should see the grub screen with an option to boot into ubuntu, or into the Windows boot loader.

The command “top” is a valuable command in the Linux command line. As a Linux administrator this is almost always the first command I use looking for Linux issues. “top” will show you many things, and I will discuss some of the important features of “top.”

Here is an example of what you should see if you run the command “top” in the commmand line.

repsol@minime ~ $ top

top – 21:32:58 up 1:14, 1 user, load average: 0.63, 0.60, 0.54
Tasks: 155 total, 1 running, 153 sleeping, 0 stopped, 1 zombie
Cpu(s): 20.4%us, 6.6%sy, 0.0%ni, 73.0%id, 0.0%wa, 0.0%hi, 0.0%si, 0.0%st
Mem: 2706252k total, 1510544k used, 1195708k free, 82144k buffers
Swap: 3905532k total, 0k used, 3905532k free, 739328k cached

PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND
4225 repsol 20 0 222m 55m 12m S 27 2.1 7:33.22 chrome
1456 root 20 0 197m 88m 51m S 8 3.3 2:21.84 Xorg
5191 repsol 20 0 227m 57m 27m S 8 2.2 2:26.16 chrome
4031 repsol 20 0 639m 74m 37m S 5 2.8 2:28.35 chrome
2684 repsol 20 0 159m 12m 9692 S 2 0.5 0:06.29 lxterminal
4177 repsol 20 0 255m 75m 25m S 2 2.8 1:17.50 chrome
6366 repsol 20 0 2852 1172 896 R 1 0.0 0:00.11 top

OK lets go over this line by line:
1st line
top – 21:32:58 up 1:14, 1 user, load average: 0.63, 0.60, 0.54
The first interesting thing you see is 21:32:58 This is the time right now.
up 1:14 is how long the server has been up. This means 1 hour and 14 minutes.
1 user means there is one user logged in.
Load Average is the load average now, last 5 min , and last 15 min.

2nd Line:
Tasks: 155 total, 1 running, 153 sleeping, 0 stopped, 1 zombie
This is pretty straight forward. Basically 155 total possible tasks, 1 running 153 sleeping and 1 zombie.
zombie is a process where the parent processor stopped but the spawned child process didn’t die. I will cover that in a later blog.

3rd line:
Cpu(s): 20.4%us, 6.6%sy, 0.0%ni, 73.0%id, 0.0%wa, 0.0%hi, 0.0%si, 0.0%st
This is the load averages of the CPU. For the begining admin all you really need to be concerned about is teh first number 20.4% This is a ten minute average of the CPU load.
Note if you hit “1” while top is running, you will see the stats of all of the procs.
Example:
Cpu0 : 23.8%us, 6.7%sy, 0.0%ni, 68.8%id, 0.7%wa, 0.0%hi, 0.0%si, 0.0%st
Cpu1 : 20.9%us, 7.1%sy, 0.0%ni, 72.0%id, 0.0%wa, 0.0%hi, 0.0%si, 0.0%st

4th and 5th line:
Mem: 2706252k total, 1507796k used, 1198456k free, 82836k buffers
Swap: 3905532k total, 0k used, 3905532k free, 737080k cached

The top line is Mem IN this case it shows I have 2G ram
Swap shows I have 4G swap.

Really the important thing is the second column in the Swap line 0k. That means that the OS is not swapping which is good, but if you have a server running slow and it is swapping it is a good indication a reboot could be in order. Rebooting the Linux server will clear swap.

If it is swapping, the next lines show the most offensive processes in order of the most offensive.

PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND
4225 repsol 20 0 224m 56m 12m S 27 2.1 10:08.99 chrome
1456 root 20 0 197m 88m 51m S 9 3.4 3:01.51 Xorg
5191 repsol 20 0 227m 57m 27m S 9 2.2 3:12.96 chrome

As you can see, I am not swapping yet, but chrome is the biggest CPU draw on my system now. If I was swapping I could try to restart the chrome service or reboot the server if it is the right time to do so.

Lastly:
If you type “c” without the quotes, it will show the actual command it is running in the process list.

4031 repsol 20 0 639m 76m 37m S 14 2.9 3:13.73 /opt/google/chrome/chrome

I hope this short tutorial is helpful. If anybody has any suggestions for a basic Linux lesson hit me up, and I will gladly throw something together.