Identifying Hardware

CPU Architecture

Installing Gentoo Linux reminds me that there are times when a GNU/Linux user can benefit from knowing the details of their hardware. uname is a great command to accomplish this.

$ uname -a # a for all information
Linux livecd 2.6.19-gentoo-r5 #1 SMP Thu Apr 5 15:05:48 UTC 2007 i686 Intel(R) Celeron(R) Celeron(R) CPU 2.93GHz GenuineIntel GNU/Linux

Here, uname tells us that a LiveCD is running with Linux kernel version 2.6.19-gentoo-r5. It's compiled for i686 multiprocessor systems. The processor in use is a Intel Celeron and it's clocked at 2.93GHz.

PCI Bus

Another great command for learning about your hardware is lspci. If your Linux kernel isn't using some of the hardware on your computer, you may find that lspci won't list any details about those certain pieces of hardware, however. Here's an example of it in use:

# lspci -v
00:00.0 Host bridge: ATI Technologies Inc R200 AGP Bridge [Mobility Radeon 7000 IGP] (rev 05)
Flags: bus master, 66MHz, medium devsel, latency 64
Memory at b0000000 (32-bit, prefetchable) [size=64M]
Memory at b4000000 (32-bit, prefetchable) [size=4K]
Capabilities: [a0] AGP version 2.0

For brevity, I've only included the first piece of hardware found on the PCI bus. We can also list the hardware in a tree, which is great for seeing what pieces run through various busses.

# lspci -tv

The -v switch just makes the output a little more verbose.