Sometime is useful to have information on a system when you login into it via ssh or via a local terminal, or perhaps just to have a warmer welcome with some ASCII art and information on your system, on Linux there are many software that do this work, we can call them Shell information tools.
These tools are designed to run in a terminal to show information on your distribution/system.
screenFetch
This handy Bash script can be used to generate one of those nifty terminal theme information + ASCII distribution logos you see in everyone’s screenshots nowadays. You choose the distribution logo, and can customize the colors and commands that the script uses to take the actual screenshot. This script is very easy to add to and can easily be extended, and the more ideas, the better.
Installation
Screenfetch is wrote in bash, so all you need to do is download the file “screenFetch” and edit the settings at the top of the file. There are comments that should make all of the settings fairly easy to edit there, and a configuration reference is available at Configuration.
If you use a .deb distribution (Debian, Ubuntu, etc) you can also install the debian package: http://served.kittykatt.us/projects/screenfetch/screenfetch-2.4.4.deb
These are some screenshots of screenfetch
Archey
Its a simple screenshot/info tool similar to Screenfetch, Archey is written in python 2.6 and was originally written for Arch Linux but the current version of archey supports many other popular linux distros such as Debian, Ubuntu, Gentoo, Linux Mint and Fedora.
The dependencies are: git, python, scrot and lsb-release
Installation and usage
To install archey on Ubuntu and Debian you can use the following commands:
sudo apt-get install lsb-release scrot wget http://github.com/downloads/djmelik/archey/archey-0.2.8.deb sudo dpkg -i archey-0.2.8.deb |
For rpm based distro there is an older release packaged as .rpm that you can download from here
Or you can download the latest version (0.3.0) directly as a python script.
After the installation you can simply run archey in your terminal and you’ll get something similar to this:
And to do a screenshot use the option -s.
screenfo
screenfo outputs a load of system information, including the running window manager, GTK theme, icons, fonts, shell, terminal emulator, and much more, while taking the screenshot, similar to the others this one is wrote in perl.
REQUIREMENTS
Perl => 5.10
Term::ExtendedColor, available from the CPAN:
or github: http://github.com/trapd00r/Term-ExtendedColor
Some standard UNIX tools:
scrot for taking the actual screenshot
Installation and usage
One of the requirement is not available as package for some distribution (ubuntu for example) so these are the instructions to install it via cpan:
cpan Term::ExtendedColor git clone git://github.com/trapd00r/screenfo cd screenfo perl Makefile.PL make && su -c 'make install' cp screenfo.conf $HOME/.screenfo.conf |
After that you can run from the terminal the command screenfo, with some of the following options:
-c, --color specify colorscheme to use
-l, --list list available colorschemes
-a, --ascii specify ascii art to use
-n, --noran dont randomize the colors
-s --shot take screenshot
Conclusions
These are 3 useful tools that you can use to give information about your system, to automatically start one of these programs whenever you open the terminal, you just need to add it into your bashrc file (/home/username/.bashrc for local user), and you’ll have the output at every login.
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