Within Linux, you can find any relevant information you may be seeking about what hardware is installed. There are several methods and sources of information to achieve this. Firstly, there’s the procfs mounted on /proc; a virtual file system containing information about processes and also about hardware. Examples:
(~)$: cat /proc/cpuinfo
processor : 0
vendor_id : GenuineIntel
cpu family : 6
model : 13
model name : Intel(R) Pentium(R) M processor 1.60GHz
stepping : 6
cpu MHz : 1600.000
cache size : 2048 KB
fdiv_bug : no
hlt_bug : no
f00f_bug : no
coma_bug : no
fpu : yes
fpu_exception : yes
cpuid level : 2
wp : yes
flags : fpu vme de pse tsc msr mce cx8 apic sep mtrr pge mca cmov pat clflush dts acpi mmx fxsr sse sse2 ss tm pbe est tm2
bogomips : 3197.81
(proc)$: cat swaps
Filename Type Size Used Priority
/dev/hda5 partition 995988 0 -1
(proc)$: cat ide/hda/model
FUJITSU MHV2060AH
(proc)$: cat ide/hda/geometry
physical 16383/16/63
logical 65535/16/63
(proc)$: head -n 1 meminfo
MemTotal: 906268 kB
(proc)$: grep -B1 -i mouse bus/usb/devices
S: Manufacturer=Logitech
S: Product=Optical USB Mouse
You can get detailed information about the entire PCI bus using the “lspci” command. The “-v” flag increases verbosity. Examples:
0000:02:03.0 Network controller: Broadcom Corporation BCM4309 802.11a/b/g (rev 03)
Subsystem: Dell Truemobile 1450 MiniPCI
Flags: bus master, fast devsel, latency 64, IRQ 19
Memory at dfdfe000 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=8K]
0000:02:08.0 Ethernet controller: Intel Corporation 82562ET/EZ/GT/GZ – PRO/100 VE (LOM) Ethernet Controller Mobile (rev 03)
Subsystem: Dell: Unknown device 01a4
Flags: bus master, medium devsel, latency 64, IRQ 20
Memory at dfdfd000 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=4K]
I/O ports at df40 [size=64]
Another excellent source of information is the output of the “dmesg” command. You’ll probably want to grep the output or pipe it into a pager as there will be quite a lot of data. Here are some snippets:
[4294671.712000] hda: FUJITSU MHV2060AH, ATA DISK drive
[4294672.120000] hdb: HL-DT-STCD-RW/DVD-ROM GCC-4244N, ATAPI CD/DVD-ROM drive
[4294672.208000] hda: 117210240 sectors (60011 MB) w/8192KiB Cache, CHS=65535/16
/63, UDMA(100)
[4294682.739000] e100: Intel(R) PRO/100 Network Driver, 3.5.10-k2-NAPI
If you’re using udev (as most modern distributions are), a quick glance into /dev/ can also be revealing. In fact, there is probably more information available than you’ll even need.
