Thursday, December 18, 2008

Knowing your hardware

In linux, there are a few ways that you can know you hardware details without opening the chassis of your machine. Below are a few ways that I know and hopefully can help linux users out there;

  1. Refer to the /proc directory. This directory contains a few files that can give you information about your hardware such as memory (meminfo), processor (cpuinfo), partitions (partition) and many more
  2. Use "lspci" command. This is a command to list all pci devices connected to your machine
  3. Use "lshw" command. This command will list out all hardware installed on your system. Available in ubuntu
  4. Use "kudzu -p" command. This is redhat/centos hardware probing and installing tool. Use "kudzu -p" to display all the hardware connected to the system
  5. Use "dmidecode" command. This is a tool for dumping bios information into human readable form
  6. Run "lsusb" to list out all usb devices. Thanks to KwangErn Liew for the suggestion in the comment.
If anyone have any tool that I didn't list out, please feel free to drop out a comment