How can I find my hardware details?

Question

Is there any built-in software or terminal method allowing me to view the hardware profiles on my system? Windows equivalent of such a feature would be Device Manager.

Answer 1

There are a few options:

• lspci will show you most of your hardware in a nice quick way. It has varying levels of verbosity so you can get more information out of it with -v and -vv flags if you want it. The -k argument is a good way to find out which kernel driver a piece of hardware is using.

  But it is only a very simple, quick way of getting a list of hardware. I often ask people to post the output of it here when trying to identify their wireless hardware. It's great for things like that.

  It doesn't show USB hardware other than the USB busses.

• lsusb is like lspci but for USB devices. Similar functionality with similar verbosity options. Good if you want to know what's plugged in.

• sudo lshw will give you a very comprehensive list of hardware and settings.

  It gives you so much information, I suggest you pipe it through less or output it to a file and open that in something you can move around in:

  sudo lshw | less
  

  Of course this is usually a lot of information. You often only need info on a small subset of your hardware and lshw will let you select a category. If you just wanted to see your network devices, for example, run this:

  sudo lshw -c network
  

• If you want something graphical, I suggest you look at hardinfo. You'll need to install it first:

  sudo apt-get install hardinfo
  

  You then just run it from the same terminal with hardinfo. I don't know that it has a menu location by default.

  But it can give you slightly more information (boots, available kernels, etc) than the other options, as well as giving you similar lists of PCI and USB hardware like the first two commands.

  It also provides some simple benchmarking. I think the developers aim to make it a replacement for Sandra (a popular Windows hardware information gathering tool).

  It even has options to output a nice report that you can send to somebody (though it can easily be too much information).

Answer 2

There are several ways to gather hardware information. I will post all the possibilities I know. For further information on any of the programs please consult their man pages.

Option one

lshw which should be installed by default. You'll have to run it as super user (sudo).

It will present a very detailed list of pretty much every component. To get a shorter list representation you can use the -short flag.

You can make it output the information in several ways.

Option two

hwinfo which you'd have to install. It is in the repositories.

It does also present the components in a very detailed fashion. Here the --short flag will give you a nice hardware category sorted list.

With the --[hwtype] option you can get detailed information about a selected hardware type only, which is quite handy sometimes.

I don't know of any one-in-all solution to dis/enable hardware or drivers. Drivers generally are kernel modules which you can enable (add) and disable (remove) using the modprobe command.

Using lsmod you can find out which modules are currently loaded.

Answer 3

Device Manager from the Ubuntu Software Centre.

Answer 4

HardwareLiSter is a useful tool that can show you detailed info on all the hardware on your system in a nice GUI interface.

If you prefer to use a terminal try sudo dmidecode which will give you a very detailed list of all the hardware too.