inxi installation and usage on Ubuntu/Debian

The inxi Linux command can be used to see various system information and other handy bits of data right from your terminal. The command is ordinarily not installed by default. However, it is a small software package that provides access to the command, and it proves especially useful to system administrators and power users.

In this tutorial, you will learn how to install inxi on Ubuntu and Debian based Linux systems. Then, we will take you through some example usage of inxi so you can learn some handy options and syntax for the program.

In this tutorial you will learn:

• How to install inxi on Debian and Ubuntu
• How to use inxi command through usage examples

Software Requirements and Linux Command Line Conventions

Category	Requirements, Conventions or Software Version Used
System	Ubuntu and Debian
Software	inxi
Other	Privileged access to your Linux system as root or via the sudo command.
Conventions	# – requires given linux commands to be executed with root privileges either directly as a root user or by use of sudo command $ – requires given linux commands to be executed as a regular non-privileged user

inxi Installation Instructions

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You can use the commands below to install inxi with your system’s package manager.

To install inxi on Ubuntu, Debian, and Linux Mint, and other Debian-based systems:

$ sudo apt update
$ sudo apt install inxi

After the short installation, you can move on to the usage examples below and try some of them out in your own terminal.

inxi Command Usage Examples

1. The inxi command with no further options will output some basic information about our system hardware, Linux kernel, the number of processes currently running, and our shell.

   $ inxi
   

   

2. To see more detailed information about your system, you can append the --full option.

   $ inxi --full
   

   

3. There are certain options that can be used if you only want to see information about a specific hardware category. For example, -C will show CPU information and -G will show graphics information.
   

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   $ inxi -C
   $ inxi -G
   

   

   See the man page for what other flags can be used to display information about a particular component.

4. Another interesting feature offered by inxi is the ability to retrieve weather information from your command line. This can be accomplished with the -w option.

   $ inxi -w
   

   Or specify a location to retrieve weather information for with the -W option and entering the location.

   $ inxi -W Warsaw,Poland
   

   

5. inxi has various formatting options, if you would like to make the output look different. Use the -c option and a number to try different color options. You can try and number 0 through 42. For example, the following command will output full system information in a red and cyan theme.

   $ inxi --full -c 30
   

   

6. inxi works in user space so it will be available also for non-privileged users. You may want to check whether you can improve inxi’s output information by running:

   $ inxi --recommends 
   

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Closing Thoughts

In this tutorial, we saw how to install inxi and subsequently use the command on a Debian or Ubuntu based Linux system. inxi proves very useful for outputting system information quickly and with a basic command syntax. It also packs a few handy surprises under the hood, like the ability to retrieve a weather forecast. You are sure to get a lot of use from it when it comes to checking system specs or other bits of information.