Have you ever wanted to find out more information about your Linux system, but are not sure where you can obtain those information? You may want to find out what distro you are using (if you are using a friend’s laptop), the desktop manager, the theme it is using, the kernel information etc. This information is usually scattered around and there is no single place to view all this information. With ScreenFetch, you will be able to view such system information in the terminal.
ScreenFetch is known as “The BASH Screenshot Information Tool” and it can display your theme, hardware information and distro’s logo in ASCII, right in the terminal. You can even get it to take a screenshot or even customize the screenshot command.
1. Download ScreenFetch from its GIT page. You don’t need to install GIT to download the software. Just click on the link to download the tar.gz file.
2. Extract the compressed file to your Home folder. The latest version as of this post is 3.1.0, so you should see a “screenfetch-3.1.0” folder. Open it up and you should see a “screenfetch-dev” file. This is the only file that we need.
3. Open a terminal and type the following:
cd screenfetch-3.1.0 ./screenfetch-dev
This is what you will see:
On the left is the Ubuntu logo in ASCII art. On the right, it shows the system information such as the distro, kernel, uptime, resolution, desktop environment, theme used, font, hard disk space, CPU and even the available RAM.
4. There are several options supported by ScreenFetch:
-v: Verbose output.-n: Do no display ASCII distribution logo.-s: Take a screenshot of the current desktop.-l: Specify that you have a light background. This turns all white text into dark gray text (in ascii logos and in information output).-c 'COMMAND': Here you can specify a custom screenshot command for the script to execute. Surrounding quotes are required.-D 'DISTRO': Here you can specify your distribution for the script to use. Surrounding quotes are required.
You can get it to take a screenshot of your desktop with the command:
./screenfetch-dev -s
Installing ScreenFetch
You don’t really need to install ScreenFetch to use it (as it is just a simple script that you can place and run from any folder). However, if you are keen to install it so you can just type the screenfetch command without going to the specific folder, here is how you can do it.
In your terminal:
sudo cp screenfetch-3.1.0/screenfetch-dev /usr/bin/screenfetch sudo chmod +x /usr/bin/screenfetch
What we have done is simply copy the “screenfetch-dev” script to “/usr/bin” (the folder where all applications are kept) and make it executable. You can now run screenfetch in your terminal to display the theme information.
To uninstall, simply run the command:
sudo rm /usr/bin/screenfetch
Conclusion
ScreenFetch is useful only if you need to find out about your system information and you want it to view them all in one place. It doesn’t show all the detail and you probably won’t need to use it all the time. It is definitely a useful tool. Let us know what you think of this tool.
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