unix - terminal commands that give general info about your hardware

There are a number of (terminal) commands that give general info about your hardware:

lshw
hwinfo
dmidecode

If any of these are not installed then search & install them using synaptic.

Preferably use these (and the ones at the end of this post) with sudo:

sudo lshw

etc. (Sudo gives administrative rights.)

These spit out so much info that it may be better to save the output into a text file:

sudo lshw > info1.txt
sudo hwinfo > info2.txt
sudo dmidecode > info3.txt

Start by using the short versions

sudo lshw -short
sudo hwinfo --short

They have flags to restrict the output to certain hardware. For example

sudo lshw -class system

gives a basic info and motherboard. To learn more about these flags see their man pages:

man lshw

etc.

Some other commands:

lspci (Lists PCI devices including Audio, VGA, Ethernet etc.)
aplay -l (sound info)
uname -a (kernel info)
lsusb (list USB devices)
ls /dev/disk/* -lah (disk info)
fdisk -l (disk info)
df -h (disk usage info)
free -m (memory info)
cat /proc/swaps (swap file/partition info)


and the list goes on and on.