Terminal help for a Linux user

[UnixHackerBeard]

My girlfriend has a powerbook G4 with a powerPC processor, which I am not familiar with. I wish to monitor temperature and RAM usage via the terminal and I was wondering if such utilities are installed by default, or if temerature and ram managing applications are available somewhere else (looking for something like acpi or sensors which are available for linux). Also, what are the device names corresponding to wlan0 and eth0 on OS X? With Linux I'd type "sudo ifconfig wlan0 down" to take the wireless connection down and renew my IP, but I know BSD device names are different but I can't recall what they are. Help with any of these topics would be appreciate. OS X is a great OS and I'd like to become more familiar with it.

 

[macbri]

Hi there!

There might be other possibilities, but here's one set of suggestions:

RAM usage: try "top -l 1" (that's a lowercase L) and redirect to a file, or grep out the lines you want which are near the beginning of the output.

Temp: If you download the (free) Temp. monitor application from bresink.com it comes with a command-line utility "tempmonitor" which will report (among other things) the CPU temperature. Check the docs on the site for details (not my site, I'm sorry to say).

Device names: Ethernet is typically "en0" and the airport (wlan) is "en1". You can for example, exactly as you describe, "sudo ifconfig en1 down" to shut off the airport.

Hope that helps!