A lightweight, cross-platform data mining utility

Snowball makes it easy to quickly get information about hardware usage statistics and process information.

Note: Code examples are written for Debian-based Linux distros and may not work with other operating systems

Before beginning, make sure all dependencies are met, or Snowball will not run. See the Dependency Information section for more information. To run Snowball, simply run

./snowball.py

in Snowball's directory, and Snowball will write its output to the console. Information is collected in the order of volatility, which means that the information most likely to change is collected first, and more constant information is collected last. It's also possible to write Snowball's output to a log file:

./snowball.py > log-name.txt

All of the information collected by Snowball will be sent into the log file for easy access later.

Snowball has some requirements before it will run. First off, make sure you have Python 3.3 or newer. Then, install psutil 1.2.1. It's recommended that you install psutil using pip to ensure that psutil will be installed correctly.

Debian/Ubuntu: To install Python 3.3, run

sudo apt-get install python3

To install pip, run

sudo apt-get install python3-pip

After pip is installed, run

sudo pip3 install psutil

Windows:

To install Python 3.3, download and install it from the link above. Then, download and run pip-Win. Follow the instructions on the page provided.

Note: psutil requires a C compiler to install properly. Install Visual C++ 2010 Express; if you're on a 64-bit system, follow the instructions in this article. If you don't want to do this, you can install an unsupported precompiled binary, but this is not recommended.

Snowball is still in its initial alpha stage of testing and release, so many features may not work and there may be bugs present in the code. Snowball may also change drastically from commit to commit.