I'm going to be frank... I'm worried we have a "Blind leading the blind" situation here. IF you have to ask the questions you are asking, you are probably not ready to be doing this kind of remote administration... THAT SAID, the following is a pretty strong poke in the right direction...
The Linux equivalent to BAT files are BASH files. Programming in BASH is philosophically, but not syntactically, similar... You will probably have to start learning from scratch. Still, once you have a functional BASH file, running it SHOULD be as easy as clicking on it in the file browser (Although, I've never done this... And I would do some more sanity checking in the script to make sure I KNOW where the file is gonna be saved) this will require MUCH more sanity checking than my example below), or even in a worst case scenario, opening a command line, running the script (/mnt/script.bash), and it will do it's thing (Again, that would require more sanity checks than my example below provides; If, on the other hand, they switch to the folder first... ie, cd /mnt/, then ./script.bash, the example below would then work fine). You COULD put it on a liveCD, and set it to run the script on boot (Either through a cron job, or some other auto-starter)... In effect, this will make the script as easy as "Plug it in and reboot..." But I actually recommend against using a LiveCD for automated diagnostics. Sure, it would work just fine for hardware oriented issues, but it would be completely worthless in diagnosing OS configuration issues, because it will run in the LiveCD environment, NOT the native, on disk system. At any rate, you are gonna have to learn a few basic concepts: 1) Basic BASH scripting. There are lots of good guides out there (Google "Bash scripting"), I recommend walking through a couple of them and try out all of their examples. 2) You really need to understand pipes and output redirection (Google "Linux i/o redirection"). You will have to know | (Pipe), > (Write over), and >> (Write into). Again, various guides are on the internet, I recommend you use several of them so you understand some of the eccentricities. 3) The tools that will check the values you need... This will just be a matter of knowing the commands you need, and how to pipe the output to a file. This will make more sense once you understand the above. FOR EXAMPLE, in the example you gave (Checking CPU) you will want to check out uname... 4) The tools for filtering outputs. For example, you will almost certainly need grep, and maybe cat and awk as well. The following VERY BASIC script will report all of the hardware information available through uname, and how much RAM is installed, and write it to a file called results.txt located in same folder where the program was run from (Presumably the flash drive itself). KEEP IN MIND THAT THIS SCRIPT MAKES NO EFFORT TO VERIFY WHERE THE FILE IS BEING WRITTEN! If there is any chance that this script is CALLED from somewhere other than the folder it's stored in (IE, if you are on the command line, and you are working from your home folder, ie /home/user, and you call the script from somewhere else, ie /mnt/script.bash, then the output file will end up in /home/user. Sanity checks become somewhat environment specific, as default mount points vary slightly from distro to distro), then you will want to add a bunch of sanity checks, to verify it's writing the file to where you expect it to. #! /bin/bash uname -all > results.txt cat /proc/meminfo | grep MemTotal >> results.txt On Sun, Mar 27, 2016 at 7:05 AM, Richard Owlett <rowl...@cloud85.net> wrote: > I live in SW Missouri (or as one wag in the group has put it) "He > lives out past Estacada, even." My friend lives in Upstate NY. > Yes I realize that long distance support will create problems. > Not doing it is not an option. > > What I suggest will be either Debian or Debian based because that > is what I will be using. It will NOT be Ubuntu as Canonical is > aiming at the same market as Microsoft and comes up with similar > solutions on the operator interface. That is where His primary > problem apparently is. [Based on having known him and is wife for > ~50 years.] For the same reason Gnome3 is out. I'm leaning > towards Mate as DE. > > I'll take a two pronged approach. I have an old laptop on which > I'll install what I think is a reasonable approximation of what > he needs and he would find comfortable using. > > The second prong requires more homework on my part and is what > motivates this post. > > I'm looking for suggestions for tools to look at an unknown > system and report on the installed hardware -especially CPU, > clock speed, RAM, and networking hardware. > > Windows software [suitable for WinXP or later] would be nice. I > would put it on a flash drive with an appropriate bat file. He > would run it on each of his machines and return the drive to me > via snail mail. [Did you note the lack of user input required ;] > > The second option is for me to create a LiveCD [don't know if all > his machines can boot from a flash drive]. There would be a > script which would write the information to a flash drive I > supplied. That drive would have an appropriate UUID. > > Comments, other than I'm ... ? > TIA > > > > > _______________________________________________ > PLUG mailing list > PLUG@lists.pdxlinux.org > http://lists.pdxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug > _______________________________________________ PLUG mailing list PLUG@lists.pdxlinux.org http://lists.pdxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug
