Linux Hardware Commands

Linux Hardware Commands

There are various Linux hardware commands that will tell you a lot about the hardware that you are running on your machine.  You don’t have to take apart your computer to see what it is running.   Here is what I found out about the old machine I was running just from a live CD.

Each of these commands could be an article in itself, but this is just a brief overview. Consult the man pages for more information.

The lsblk command will tell you a great deal about the disks and how they are partitioned. SDA is my only disk on the computer, SDB is just a thumb drive to hold some information (like the screenshots). You will notice that sr0 is the live medium (the dvd itself). The lsblk command lists information about all available block devices.

The lscpu command gives us loads of information on our CPU.  As you can see the CPU is an Intel Core I5-3470 – 3.2 GHz processor. It also gives information about the L1, L2 and L3 cache and how much memory for each.

The lspci command gives you all of  the PCI information.

The lsusb command give you all of the information as to every USB device that is plugged in.

The uname command will tell you  about the operating system. If you type in just uname you will only get the output “linux”.  You need to use the -a option to get the full description of the operating system.

Another command that I want to discuss is lshw. This command summarizes the hardware information. You can display it in a number of ways: HTML, XML and standard out (your screen).

The last command is dmidecode and to use this command you need to be Root (or use SUDO).

As you can see there are two slots for RAM and only one is occupied. Looks like I can upgrade with no problems.