How to determine hardware?

Question

Is there a command to detect the type of processor, type of graphics card, type of hard drive, just the basic hardware my computer is running?

I'm running 12.04.

Answer 1

You can easily find this most of this information out with the dmidecode command:

sudo dmidecode -q

It may be a little verbose though. To find out information about a specific device, you can use the -t type argument. More information on that is here, http://www.thegeekstuff.com/2008/11/how-to-get-hardware-information-on-linux-using-dmidecode-command/

Another option would be to use lshw

sudo lshw

To find out the disk usage of your hard drive, you can use the df command:

sudo df -h

Answer 2

This command will tell you about your hardware (including the specific components you've listed):

sudo lshw

It's possible to run lshw without sudo (i.e., not as root) but it may not give as complete or accurate information.

You can run lshw with the -C flag and an argument, to get information about a specific class of hardware. See man lshw for details.

Answer 3

You can use also lspci, possibly filtering its output with grep (look for VGA or video keywords for GPU information), for example try:

$ lspci -v | grep VGA

See man lspci and also http://www.cyberciti.biz/faq/linux-tell-which-graphics-vga-card-installed/

Answer 4

"dmidecode" is a handy native linux command which gives many hardware details. I've written a script to get all the details and if someone is interested can check out here:

How To Get Hardware Info

Thanks, Mssm

Answer 5

The hw-probe tool collects outputs of most popular hardware listers (hwinfo, dmidecode, lspci, etc.): https://hub.docker.com/r/linuxhw/hw-probe/

Probe example: https://linux-hardware.org/?probe=0b29192f95

I'm the author of this project, feel free to ask any questions in comments!