Benchmarks made easier with Phoronix Test Suite, running a simple benchmark with PTS

Sahil Arora — Tue, 27 Apr 2021 14:20:21 +0000

Linux Benchmarking made easy

No longer do you need to get lots of tools and software to benchmark a system. With something like Phoronix Test Suite, the whole process has become a lot easier.

So what is Phoronix Test Suite

It's a free and open-source benchmark software that is cross-compatible with multiple operating systems.

Installing Phoronix Test Suite

Phoronix Test Suite Download

Installation on Ubuntu and Derivatives

Download the .deb file from the link.
Navigate to the location of the file and run.

$ sudo dpkg -i phoronix-test-suite*.deb

Installation on Other Linux Distributions

Download the Universal .tar.gz file.
Extract the folder and navigate to the extracted folder.
Run the following command.

$ sudo ./install-sh

Getting Started

Run the Phoronix Test Suite running by executing

$ phoronix-test-suite

Accept the EULA and conditions and wait for the dependencies to finish installing.

To get System Info

$ phoronix-test-suite system-info

Pretty self-explanatory! The result will be similar to shown in the image above.

To get sensors data

$ phoronix-test-suite system-sensors

To view all tests run

$ phoronix-test-suite list-all-tests

To view all available test suites.

$ phoronix-test-suite list-available-suites

Run your first benchmark

Let's try to run a simple benchmark like webp, to run enter the command given below

$ phoronix-test-suite benchmark webp

You will be presented with several configuration options for the benchmark. The following options will be shown for the webp benchmark. Choose the appropriate option using the indexes of the options and press enter.

After the test is completed, press Enter to open the result in a browser.

The benchmark result file would open in the browser.

Configuring The results to see different types of graphs

The more test configurations you run, the more options you will get for graphs that you want to display.

You can also export benchmark data in various formats including CSV, PDFs, HTML, etc.

That's all for now. This article is part of a series on benchmarking with Phoronix Test Suite.

Getting the i3wm tiling experience in Gnome Desktop

Sahil Arora — Mon, 26 Apr 2021 12:02:37 +0000

Introduction

Want a tiling WM but still require the capabilities of the fully fledged gnome desktop?

So what is a tiling WM?
Tiling window managers provide a perfect to setup your windows on the screen so the whole screen real estate is used. i3WM is the best know tiling window managers. i3WM is generally highly dependent on keyboard use.

Using i3WM does require a learning curve and require some time to learn on how to setup and use it as a daily driver.

Learning how to use i3WM might be a story for another day but we want to use the features of a tiling WM on the GNOME Desktop.

Installing the Pop shell

sudo apt install git node-typescript make
git clone https://github.com/pop-os/shell.git
cd shell
make local-install

Setting up the Gnome Desktop to use Pop Shell

Enable the Pop Shell extension in Gnome Tweaks under Extensions.

Enable Window tiling to create window tiles so that they can automatically place themselves on the screen

These are the default shortcuts for the pop shell. You can change them from the keyboard settings if you want to.

You can visit the pop shell settings to set the gaps between your windows if you find it too big or too small.

So what does this help with?

Gnome doesn't really support quarter tiling, on really huge screens those who use windows already know that how much quarter tiling helps.

DEV Community: Sahil Arora