The wavemon tool is a very handy tool to have in your arsenal that will help you gather information you might not otherwise have. With wavemon you can see Signal levels, Noise levels, Signal to noise ratios, frequencies, TX power, sensitivity (if available), bitrate, and so much more.

One of the only issues that might turn you off of wavemon is that it is an NCurses tool. This means the tool is run in a terminal window (I have found it runs best under Eterm) and uses ASCII to create the information it offers. Don’t let this cause you not to want to use wavemon because it is a very useful tool.

Getting and Installing

Wavemon is downloaded and installed from source. Download the tarball from the Wavemon site and save it to your hard drive. The installation steps are simple:

• decompress wavemon with the command bunzip2 xvzf wavemon-current.tar.bz2
• untar the archive with the command tar xvf wavemon-current.tar
• cd into the newly created directory with cd wavemon-current
• generate the make file will ./configure
• install wavemon with make ; make install
• start wavemon with the command wavemon

Wavemon Info Window

As you can see, in the image on the left, the Wavemon info window offers a lot of information.

At the bottom of the screen you will notice there are 10 possible options (of which some have no entries). Each of these options are different screens you can view.

The list of windows is:

• F1: Info. This is the main window that opens upon start up. This is where you get most of the information from wavemon.
• F2: Level Histogram. This displays a real-time bar-graph of Signal level, Noise level, and Signal-to-Noise Ratio.
• F3: Access point list. This feature has not been implemented yet.
• F7: Preferences. Configure Wavemon.
• F8: Help. Like a lot of Linux applications, wavemon shows the developer has a sense of humor. When you hit F8 for help it displays the message “don’t panic”. That’s it. There is more help by reading the man page (issue the command man wavemon).
• F9: About. Get all the information you need about the current wavemon release.
• F10: Quit.

You can also start wavemon with a few handy options. Those options are:

• -i This will override auto detection and use a specified network interface.
• -l Use linear level scales instead of logarithmic scales.
• -r Generate random levels for testing.

Final thoughts

If you need more information than your standard networking tools offer, and do not want to dump any extra cash into a third party offering, wavemon is just the tool for those looking to know everything there is to know about their networks. It’s easy to use, offers a ton of information, is open source, and has a tiny foot print.

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But don’t think, when you fire up Aptitude, you are going to be greeted with a sexy graphical front end. No. When you start up this application you are going to be teleported back into the mid-90s when front-end applications were just arriving onto the scene. But Aptitude is so much more than that. Aptitude is a powerful tool to help you use the apt package management system.

To open Aptitude you need to first open a terminal emulator (such as aterm, gnome-terminal, or konsole). I will warn you, if you are like me and use Aterm in full-blown transparency Aptitude might look at little strange. So instead you should fire up another terminal or use Aterm without transparency.

To start up aptitude you will need root or sudo access. Using sudo you would start Aptitude like so: sudo aptitude.

Aptitude Main Window

There are two main sections to focus on. First is the main window. This is where you will see a listing of the what is available. As you can see from the image above there are upgradable packages, new packages, etc. What you don’t see is the Aptitude menu. To access this menu you have to hit the Ctrl-T combination (that is the Control key plus the “t” key at the same time.) When you open up the Aptitude menu you navigate this menu using the arrow keys.

Aptitude Menu

Before you actually get into installing packages with Aptitude, you have to select packages to install. You do this outside of the menu in the main window. Without the menu open you can move up and down the window entries with the arrow keys. When you land on an entry you want to expand you hit the Enter key. Let’s install something.

Using the arrow keys move down to the “Not Installed Packages” entry and hit Enter. This will expand to reveal a number of sub-menus. Now scroll down to the Net sub-menu and hit Enter. Yet another sub-menu will appear containing three entries. Move to the  “main” main entry and hit Enter to reveal all of the possible applications to install.

Network Applications Available

Let’s install Gobby (a text editor/source editor that can do online collaboration). With the arrow keys move down until you see the Gobby entry. When you find Gobby hit the Enter key which will reveal all of the gory details behind Gobby.

Gobby details

This should tell you everything you need to help you make the decision to install or not to install Gobby. Let’s install it.

To select an application for installation hit the “+” key (you do have to use the Shift key for this) to mark the package for installation. Now hit the “g” key and the installation process should begin. Don’t be fooled when it seems as if Aptitude has dropped out of ncurses mode and is in full console mode, it will return to it’s ncurses glory when after you hit the Enter key when prompted (after installation is complete.)

When installation is complete you will return to the description of the package you just installed. To go back to the main window you can open up the menu (Ctrl-t) and then using the right arrow key go to the View entry. Using the down key select “Prev” to go to the previous screen. You can also hit F7 for this same action.

And there you are, you have just installed an application with Aptitude. Of course Aptitude is much more powerful than this. In later articles we’ll discuss searching, upgrading, removing, and much more with Aptitude.

In the mean time, have fun installing with Aptitude!

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