For the past few days, I’ve been jumping-out-of-my-shoes excited from reading the cover story of the February 2010 issue of Wired magazine entitled “The New Industrial Revolution,” by long-tail theorist Chris Anderson, and the related issue of Make magazine, the theme of which is “Desktop Manufacturing.”
Have you ever been messing around on your Ubuntu box, only to notice some sluggishness or some suspicious spikes in your internet connection, and wondered, “What the hell is using up all that bandwidth?” Or worse, “Have I been hacked?” If so, then NetHogs might be the program for you.
NetHogs is a lightweight Linux terminal-based tool that monitors bandwidth usage, then groups it by process, so you can see which PIDs are using the most bandwidth, and if necessary, kill them with System Monitor.
To install NetHogs on Ubuntu (tested on 9.10 Karmic), you can either use Synaptic or simply apt-get, like so:
sudo apt-get install nethogs
To run NetHogs, simply feed it the internet connection you wish to examine, and sit back.
sudo nethogs eth0
For more information and the full list of options, visit the NetHogs man page.
man nethogs
Here’s the remastered final version of Andrew McCombs’ classic documentary “The Principia Process,” which chronicles the spring 2002 launch season, and the beginnings of Team Principia. Watch and enjoy.
One of the annoying little setup items on my list of things to do every time I reinstall Kubuntu is changing the bootsplash screen resolution from 800×600 to something more appropriate for my monitor, specifically, 1280×1024. Here’s how it’s done:
sudo nano /etc/usplash.conf
The file should be altered to read:
# Usplash configuration file
# These parameters will only apply after running update-initramfs.
xres=1280
yres=1024
The final step is to update initramfs, the initial RAM disk used by the kernel when Linux first boots up:
sudo update-initramfs -u
If you skip the last step, you will probably only see your new usplash resolution during shutdown and not when your computer boots up.
That’s it!


