Practical activity

Presentation & objectives

The aim of this activity is to help you discover how your computer works, and what are the main physical elements inside it.

Also, you will learn to manipulate the terminal to navigate in your file system, and run commands.

Activity contents

You may already know the insides of your own computer, nevertheless you might not know how to get them from a Command Line Interface (CLI). In this activity, we will try to map all your system components using only the terminal. We will then verify all the information using the Graphical User Interface.

If you want you can edit a text file on your computer to write down the command lines’ output or use a good old-fashioned pen&paper.

1 — What is your operating system?

The first thing you need to know in order to continue this activity is what is your operating system. For this first question we will not get into the detail, we only need to know the OS family: Linux, Windows or MacOS.

2 — Using the command line

The second step is launching the Terminal application of your operating system. This application may differ from one OS to another (hence the first easy question):

3 — Discover your own computer

Now that you have opened the Terminal application of you specific OS we are going to learn a little bit about your computer.

3.1 — Hardware components

In this exercise we are going to try to get the list of the most important hardware components of your computer. In particular, we are going to learn about the components of the von Neumann architecture that we have introduced during the lecture.

3.1.1 — CPU

First, let’s determine your CPU:

wmic cpu get name

Get-CimInstance -ClassName Win32_Processor

lscpu

system_profiler SPHardwareDataType

Answer the following questions:

• What is your CPU vendor?

• What is the frequency of your CPU?

• Optional – Did you get the number of cores available (you may have to search for an additional parameters)?

3.1.2 — Memory

Let’s have a look at the RAM:

wmic memorychip get devicelocator, manufacturer, partnumber, serialnumber, capacity, speed, memorytype, formfactor

Get-CimInstance -ClassName Win32_PhysicalMemory

# You can also only select the information you want to display using an anonymous pipe `|`
Get-CimInstance -ClassName Win32_PhysicalMemory | Select-Object devicelocator, manufacturer, partnumber, serialnumber, capacity, speed, memorytype, formfactor

lshw -short -C memory

# Note that if you use the `lshw` command without parameters you will also get the CPU info that we retrieved before

system_profiler SPMemoryDataType

Answer the following questions:

• How much physical memory do you have on your computer?

• What is the frequency of the chip(s)?

3.1.3 — Storage

Let’s check your storage devices:

wmic diskdrive get model,serialNumber,size,mediaType

Get-CimInstance -ClassName Win32_DiskDrive

# You can also only select the information you want to display to get the same ones as the `cmd.exe` output using an anonymous pipe `|`
Get-CimInstance -ClassName Win32_DiskDrive | Select-Object model,serialNumber,size,mediaType

lsblk
hdparm -I /dev/sda

# `/dev/sd[a-z]` stands for the hard drive
# During installation, Linux takes the first hard disk found and assigns it the value `sda`
# It does the naming in alphabetical order depending on the number of disks found

system_profiler SPStorageDataType

Answer the following questions:

• How many storage drives are installed in your computer?

• What is the total size of your drive(s)?

• Do you have Hard Disk Drive(s) or Solid State Drive(s)?

• Optional – How many partitions are present, and what is a partition?

3.1.4 — Peripherals

What are the peripherals plugged to your computer? Let’s check:

wmic Path Win32_PNPEntity get Description,DeviceId

Get-PnpDevice -PresentOnly | Where-Object { $_.InstanceId -match '^USB' }

# To get all USB devices
lsusb

# To get all PCI devices (for example your graphic card)
# You may need to update the PCI ID database using a command such as `sudo update-pciids` first in order to display full information
lspci

system_profiler SPUSBDataType

# You can also install the Linux `lsusb` command to help you (you need Homebrew installed)
brew install usbutils
lsusb

Answer the following questions:

• What are the current USB devices connected to your computer if any?

• Can you get your graphic card information?

3.2 — Operating system

In this exercise we are going to learn about the features of your Operating System that we have introduced during the lecture.

3.2.1 — OS version

Let’s first get its version:

ver

Get-ComputerInfo OsName,OsVersion,OsBuildNumber,OsHardwareAbstractionLayer,WindowsVersion

uname -a

uname -a

Answer the following questions:

• What is the specific version of your operating system?

• Did you manage to get the kernel version?

3.2.2 — Processes and daemons

Let’s have a look at what is running on the computer:

tasklist

Get-Process

ps

ps

Answer the following questions:

• Is there a way to make the output more readable (think of the more command)?

• Are all the processes listed?

3.2.3 — Users

Let’s check who you are on the computer:

whoami

whoami

whoami

whoami

3.2.4 — Available resources

What is available on your computer? Let’s check the available memory first:

wmic os get TotalVisibleMemorySize,FreePhysicalMemory

Get-CimInstance -Class Win32_OperatingSystem | Select-Object FreePhysicalMemory

free

vm_stat

Then, let’s check available disk space:

chkdsk

Get-CimInstance -Class Win32_LogicalDisk |
  Select-Object -Property DeviceID, Name, @{
    label='FreeSpace'
    expression={($_.FreeSpace/1GB).ToString('F2')}
  }

df

df

3.3 — Remarks on the terminal

The command line allows you to do many more tasks that we will not cover here. However, you may have noticed that some terminal commands are simpler than the others depending on the operating system, especially the Linux ones. That can be explained by the need to interact with these OSs with a command line more often (to administer a server for example). That is why, even if you are not currently running a Linux machine, we greatly encourage you to learn and practice with Linux commands for the IMT Atlantique computer science curriculum.

4 — Using the graphical interface for validation

Now that we have obtained much of the hardware and operating system information using the CLI we are going to verify all of them using the GUI.

4.1 — The hardware components

Most of the modern OS have a single point of entry to get all the hardware components of your PC, including its CPU, drives, peripherals, etc.

sudo apt install hardinfo

sudo apt update
sudo apt install hardinfo

Answer the following questions:

• Verify that all the previous information you gathered about your computer are the same as the one presented in the GUI.

• Optional – Feel free to explore and discover other information about your hardware: your network adapters, graphic card, etc.

4.2 — The software components

Let’s check OS details using a GUI now:

You can also check the running processes:

Answer the following questions:

• Are the running processes the same that you found with the CLI?

• Launch a simple application (such as a text editor), can you see it in the list of processes?

• Optional – Try to kill this process (be careful to select the previous process and not another one).

Now, let’s find available resources:

5 — Always keep your system and applications up to date

As we have seen, your computer is running a lot of different processes either applications that you are using or services that perform various tasks in the background. There is a specific type of applications that we have not covered for the moment which are malicious software.

Malicious software, or malware, are designed to harm, exploit, or otherwise compromise a computer system or network. The primary purposes of malware include stealing sensitive information (e.g., passwords, financial data), disrupting operations (e.g., causing system crashes, deleting files), gaining unauthorized access to systems, and using compromised devices for illegal activities (e.g., sending spam, launching attacks on other systems).

They can come from various sources: applications downloaded from an untrusted sources (think of pirated games), a fraudulent link, or a macro inside a Word document received by mail for example. Here we give a list of some security best practices you should follow in order to keep your computer relatively safe (unfortunately it can never be 100% secured).

To go further

6 — Using Linux with Windows

As mentioned above, you will probably need to use Linux at some point during your curriculum at IMT Atlantique so it can be a good thing to learn the basics commands as soon as possible. For a long time, that meant having to fully install a Linux distribution on your computer replacing Windows or installed side by side. You then had to reboot your computer to chose between the two OSes which meant that you could not run both at the same time.

However, since 2016, it is possible to run a Linux environment on windows using Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL). While it was limited at first, it now uses a real Linux Kernel, and it can even execute Linux GUI applications in the newer versions.

We therefore strongly encourage you to install it and play with it. You can find the whole installation procedure on the official Microsoft Website.

When WSL and the Linux OS are installed, you will have access to a prompt starting with #. This corresponds to a root (administrator) prompt.

At this point, you can already use your Linux system by typing commands. However, you may want a graphical user interface, which is more friendly than a terminal. To do so, you can follow this tutorial.

To go beyond

If you want to improve your command line skills and impress your fellow students by never touching a mouse again you can follow the links below.

• Learning the Shell.

  Full course on shell commands.

• Writing Shell Scripts.

  Learn to write Shell scripts to automate your tasks.