At this point, we have learnt about a lot of things including how to manage users, groups and also we saw a lot of commands that are present in Linux. But what happens when we want to download something in Linux. Let’s start our discussion with that

Package Managers

As we all know package managers are programs that help you to manage packages. In linux, to download and use programs, there are primary 2 kind of package managers. One being dpkg and the other being apt. I’ll not waste your time and I’ll just give you a quick overview of these and also write out some important things about these 2

dpkg

This is the low level package manager that helps install packages after you download a .deb or .rpm file in your linux distro. Based on your distro you’ll download either .deb or .rpm.

This package manager is pretty dumb. Let’s say you download a .deb file but there are dependencies in that package, then you’ll have to manually download those dependencies at first and then you can download your application

So, most of the times, we tend to use the other package manager

apt

This is a high level package manager in your linux distro which is not dumb as dpkg. The main problem in dpkg was that you had to manually install the dependencies. But the case of apt is different. If your package has dependencies, it will automatically download it for you thus saving you a lot of time

Installing a package is very simple in this. Just type:

sudo apt install <package-name>

To see your installed packages, you can use this command:

sudo apt list --installed

To remove a command, you can use these commands

sudo apt remove <packagename> # doesn't erase user data and removes application

sudo apt remove <packagename> # removes the applicatio and also user data

Updating and Upgrading

The apt comes with utility commands for both updating and upgrading commands. The two commands being:

sudo apt update
sudo apt upgrade

The sudo apt update command fetches the latest information about available packages from the configured repositories. It essentially tells your system to check for any new or updated software packages that are available for installation or upgrade.

After running sudo apt update, the sudo apt upgrade command downloads and installs the newest versions of the software packages that are already installed on your system. It will only upgrade packages that have newer versions available.

You should use both commands together to ensure that your system is running the latest software and security patches. Running sudo apt update first is crucial because it provides the package manager with the latest information about available updates. Without it, sudo apt upgrade wouldn't be aware of the newest versions and might not install them

snap

Snap is another package manager which are used to download standalone applications which don’t normally interact with other processes. The applications installed using snap are installed in form of containers i.e they are installed in isolated environments with dependencies packaged at once

Normally it is used to download applications e.g vscode

Snap is being managed by a daemon named snapd. If you don’t have snap installed you can easily install it using:

sudo apt install snapd

Processes in Linux

To give you a simple overview processes are instances of running program. To see the processes running in your system, you can use this command

ps aux

Also you can use this command to see processes with realtime usage of CPU, MEMORY:

top # or
htop

You’ll be able to see all the processes that are currently running in your system

If you have vscode installed in your Linux system, do this experiment:

• Open vscode once and then run this:

    ps aux | grep code
  

• Close it and again run the same command

You’ll be able to understand that this returns the currently active processes. The grep part helps to sort out the processed based on the search term you provide

The processes that we open by ourself are known as interactive processes i.e we have to open then only the processes open

When you ran ps aux command, you were able to see a long list of processes. But you didn’t start them right? You will not be able to recognize most of those commands. So who started it?

Daemons

Well, those are system processes that start when your pc boots up. Those are known as daemons. Basically daemons are background processes that we don’t start, it starts at boot time automatically

These are also referred to as systemd units

Systemd

I did talk about what systemd on day 0. But here’s are some points that will give you the idea of what systemd is:

• The master daemon which looks after all the daemons

• This is also known as the service manager or the process manager

• The init system that I talked about in day 0

• Responsible for mounting fs, starting all services

Basically this is the 1st process after the boot cycle in your pc. To see a tree of processes that have ran when your system completed the boot lifecycle, you can use the command:

pstree

You’ll be able to see that the 1st and the topmost process of the tree is systemd

systemctl

This is the systemd utility that helps us to control all our daemons. With the systemctl command, you can start messing up with your background processes. Here are some commands that you can refer to get started:

sudo systemctl start <service>
sudo systemctl stop <service>
sudo systemctl restart <service>

To control weather a service will start at the system start or not, you can use the enable or disable command of systemctl:

sudo systemctl enable <service> # Enables a service at system reboot. Basically tells the pc that the service should start automatically when the pc boots up
sudo systemctl disable <service> # self explanatory

See list of active daemons

To check the list of active daemons, you can use this command:

sudo systemctl list-units

Here, you'll be able to see all kinds of processes including .devices, .services. To see only of type services:

sudo systemctl list-units -t service

Now you are well versed about how to inspect, check which processes are running. But what happens when you want to kill a running process?

kill

The kill command is used to kill a running process in linux. But to kill a process, you need to have a process id. But let me tell you one more command:

ps -u <username>

This command will list out all the processes which is running for a particular user

Now, let’s say you want to kill a process named “abc”. For that, you can use either of these 2 commands:

ps -u <userName> | grep <abc> # or
pgrep <abc> # only returns processid

Now once you have the process id, it is simple to kill a process with one command i.e:

kill <processId>

Conclusion

So, that it for today, I hope I was able to add some value to your life. Also with this article, hopefully we are done with linux as of now. Make sure to explore linux more and also a like and comment would really help me keep myself motivated in continuing this series. Thanks and see ya