The System tab provides an easy, one-stop-shopping location to find basic information about the system. The following sections help you interpret the various pieces of information contained in the System Monitor. For that information to be useful, you need to know what it means. Of course, just having a bunch of information thrown at you doesn't help at all.

File Systems: Shows information about the hard drives that are mounted on the system.

Resources: Shows real-time information about CPU and memory usage.

Processes: Shows real-time information about programs currently running on the system.

System: Displays general information about the Ubuntu workstation.

There are four window tabs of information in the System Monitor: The System Monitor tool provides information about how the system hardware and software are working. Start the System Monitor by selecting System, Administration, System Monitor from the Panel menu. The best tool for administering your Ubuntu workstation is the System Monitor.

Finally, we'll discuss the Disk Usage Analyzer tool, which allows you see where your disk space is going. Next, we'll look at a couple of utilities that Ubuntu provides for configuring which system services and applications run, both when your system starts and when you log into your desktop. We'll then take a look at how Ubuntu uses log files to document when things go wrong on the system. It also offers guidelines for creating a new system and getting the most out of each application available.įirst we'll take a look at the System Monitor, which can provide some excellent information about what programs are running and how much of the system resources they're using.

The book instructs how to install Ubuntu Linux in most environments, including dual-boot and text-based installations. This chapter excerpt on basic Ubuntu administration (download PDF) is taken from the book Ubuntu Linux Secrets.

Linux process monitor tool