Finding the Computer Hardware Information is quite easy in Linux systems. The Linux system offers us quite a lot of tools for finding out the hardware configuration.
You can find the CPU information by reading the /proc/cpuinfo file.
The /proc/cpuinfo provides the processor’s model name, speed in Mhz, cache size and other usefull info:
$ less /proc/cpuinfo
Display only the model name, mhz speed and cache size:
$ cat /proc/cpuinfo | grep -iE "model name|cpu mhz|cache size"
To find out how many cores your processor has, use:
$ cat /proc/cpuinfo | grep processor | wc -l
To find out information about the memory, read the /proc/meminfo file.
The /proc/meminfo provides the total memory, the free memory, the total swap memory, the free swap memory or other usefull info:
$ less /proc/meminfo
Display only the total memory and the free memory:
$ cat /proc/meminfo | grep -Ei "memtotal|memfree"
The procfs (/proc) provides special system software and hardware information. Read more about /proc here.
To find the PCI devices in your system, use this command the lspci command:
$ lspci | less
To find out the USB devices connected to the system, use the lsusb command:
$ lsusb | less
To find the full system information, use hwinfo.
Install hwinfo if it is missing.
- Debian /Ubuntu / Mint install: sudo apt-get install hwinfo
- Fedora /CentOS install: sudo yum install hwinfo
- openSUSE: zypper install hwinfo
Use hwinfo –short for getting a short information list.
You can personalize the hwinfo output, so that it displays only what you need:
Note: there are two – characters (–), after hwinfo .
- Information about the network controller: hwinfo –netcard.
- CPU information only: hwinfo –cpu.
- Memory information only: hwinfo –memory.
- BIOS information only: hwinfo –bios.
Also sudo dmidecode offers BIOS information.