At a time when banks are shedding IT roles by the dozen, it seems counter-intuitive that 83 per cent of the nation’s chief information officers should report they are confident about the future of their business to the extent that 45 per cent expect to hire IT staff in the first six months of the year. The question remains – is this a dead cat bounce?
In my last article I looked at gaming on Ubuntu Linux and concluded that it is alive and well! Now we head back into the "useful" side of Linux. Linux has a bad reputation of having to use the Command Line Interface (CLI) to do anything really useful. In this article I will talk about some graphical interfaces for tools to get those "useful" things done.
If you want to know how much disk space you have on a Windows machine, what do you do? There's a number of different ways of getting that information, but the way that I usually use is to go to Windows Explorer and right click on the drive letter and select Properties. This opens up a window which looks at the drive and tells me how many folders and items there are, how big it is and how much space is left.
In Linux, how can I see how I get the same information?
You can use the Command Line Interface (CLI) and type in "df -lh" and see something like the following:
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/hda5 15G 6.5G 7.7G 46% /
varrun 442M 136K 442M 1% /var/run
varlock 442M 0 442M 0% /var/lock
udev 442M 84K 442M 1% /dev
devshm 442M 288K 442M 1% /dev/shm
lrm 442M 39M 404M 9% /lib/modules/2.6.24-19-generic/volatile
/dev/hda6 15G 9.4G 4.9G 66% /home
gvfs-fuse-daemon 15G 6.5G 7.7G 46% /home/hamish/.gvfs
...but that won't actually mean very much to many people (including me!).
So how do I some more useful information using a graphical tool? I can go to the Places menu, click on my home folder (the one with the house icon on it), click the Up button, then right-click on the name of the home folder again and click on Properties. This gives me the information I want.
In fact I can right-click on any folder and then click on Properties and see how many items there are, how much used space and how much free space there is. There really is no difference to how this works in Windows.
Please read onto page 2 to find out another way of getting this information.
Michelle Thomas
| Smelly Black Dog Internet is proud to announce that the company has signed up for Simtronic Technologies new wholesale broadband service as an…
How to Make Business Discovery Work for Your Business
Business Discovery takes its cues from consumer apps. Like Google, it encourages us- ers to hunt for and explore data without worrying about or even noticing the underly- ing technology. Their entire experience is working within an intuitive interface to get real-time, self-service results with only minimal training. ...more
Try an easy-to-use set of web-enabled
tools for business-class productivity services. Office 365 provides
anywhere-access to email, important documents, contacts, and calendars
on almost any device.
