Display Linux System Information In Terminal Using Macchina

In this guide, we are going to see what is Macchina and how to display Linux system information in terminal using Macchina utility.

What is Macchina?

There are many tools and methods exists to display a system's details in Linux. You can use tools like ScreenFetch, Neofetch, Inxi to get the Linux system information. You can also use Python's import module to view the details of a Linux system. Today, we will see yet another similar tool. Let us give a warm welcome to a newcomer named Macchina to the club! Using Macchina, we can get the basic system information of a Linux machine in the Terminal.

Macchina is a basic system information fetcher. It is similar to Neofetch but with a focus on performance and minimalism. It is even faster than Neofetch tool. For those wondering, Macchina is an Italian word for Machine. Macchina is free and open source program written in Rust programming language. It supports Linux, macOS, BSD and the Windows support is coming soon.

Install Macchina in Linux

Macchina is available in AUR. So you can install Macchina using any AUR helper programs (E.g. Paru or Yay) on Arch Linux and its variants like Manjaro Linux as shown below:

$ paru -S macchina

Or,

$ yay -S macchina

On other Linux distributions, you can install Macchina using Rust's Cargo package manager. Make sure you have installed Rust:

• Install Rust Programming Language In Linux

And then run the following command to install Macchina using cargo in Linux:

$ cargo install macchina

Display Linux System Information In Terminal Using Macchina

To view your Linux system's details using Macchina, simply run it without any options:

$ macchina

Sample output:

    Host     — sk@ostechnix
    Machine  — Dell Inc.  Inspiron N5050
    Kernel   — Linux 5.4.0-66-generic
    Distro   — Ubuntu
    DE       — Ubuntu
    WM       — GNOME Shell
    Packages — 2656
    Shell    — /bin/bash
    Terminal — Deepin-terminal
    Uptime   — 59 minutes
    CPU      — Intel® Core™ i3-2350M CPU @ 2.30GHz (4)
    Memory   — 2.2 GB/8.1 GB
    Battery  — Full

As you can see in the above output, Macchina fetches the following details of a system:

• Host details in the format of username@hostname
• Product details (e.g. DELL)
• Kernel version
• Distribution name
• Desktop Environment
• Window Manager
• Total no of installed packages
• Shell (E.g. Bash)
• Terminal
• Uptime
• CPU/Processor details
  • Model
  • Thread count
• Uptime
• Memory Usage
• Battery
  • Percentage
  • Status
• Palette (optional)

Currently, Macchina shows the package count only for the following package managers:

• Pacman
• Portage
• APT
• XBPS
• pkgsrc
• Homebrew

Did you notice that the logo ASCII art is missing? Yes! The developer wants to keep Macchina simple, so the logo part is excluded. Let us hope that the future versions might have this feature!

Macchina has many flags to customize the output as you wish. Here is the one that the developer used for the screenshot in the official github page.

$ macchina -U -b -p -S -s 2

Here,

• We used -U for shortened up time output,
• -b for bars to display the RAM and Battery usage,
• -p for color palette at the end,
• -S for shortened shell output,
• -s 2 for 2 character spacing.

You can add/remove these options as per your liking to get a custom output.

Here is the sample output for the above command:

    Host      —  sk@ostechnix
    Machine   —  Dell Inc.  Inspiron N5050
    Kernel    —  Linux 5.4.0-66-generic
    Distro    —  Ubuntu
    DE        —  Ubuntu
    WM        —  GNOME Shell
    Packages  —  2656
    Shell     —  bash
    Terminal  —  Deepin-terminal
    Uptime    —  3h 22m
    CPU       —  Intel® Core™ i3-2350M CPU @ 2.30GHz (4)
    Memory    —  ( ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● )
    Battery   —  ( ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● )

To view the list of all available options, run the help section:

$ macchina --help

Macchina could be a minimal and simple alternative to Neofetch and other system information fetcher tools. Give it a try and see if it fits for you.

Resource:

• Macchina GitHub Repository