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. -nn will let you simply know the hardware ID which is great for searching.

  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.

  Here are three real world examples:

  Graphics:

  $ lspci -nnk | grep VGA -A1
  03:00.0 VGA compatible controller [0300]: NVIDIA Corporation GF110 [GeForce GTX 580] [10de:1080] (rev a1)
      Kernel driver in use: nvidia
  

  Audio:

  $lspci -v | grep -A7 -i "audio"
  00:01.1 Audio device: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD/ATI] Kabini HDMI/DP Audio
      Subsystem: Acer Incorporated [ALI] Device 080d
      Flags: bus master, fast devsel, latency 0, IRQ 34
      Memory at f0940000 (64-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=16K]
      Capabilities: <access denied>
      Kernel driver in use: snd_hda_intel
      Kernel modules: snd_hda_intel
  
  --
  00:14.2 Audio device: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD] FCH Azalia Controller (rev 02)
      Subsystem: Acer Incorporated [ALI] Device 080d
      Flags: bus master, slow devsel, latency 32, IRQ 35
      Memory at f0944000 (64-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=16K]
      Capabilities: <access denied>
      Kernel driver in use: snd_hda_intel
      Kernel modules: snd_hda_intel
  

  Networking:

  $ lspci -nnk | grep net -A2
  00:0a.0 Ethernet controller [0200]: NVIDIA Corporation MCP79 Ethernet [10de:0ab0] (rev b1)
      Subsystem: Acer Incorporated [ALI] Device [1025:0222]
      Kernel driver in use: forcedeth
  --
  05:00.0 Ethernet controller [0200]: Atheros Communications Inc. AR242x / AR542x Wireless Network Adapter (PCI-Express) [168c:001c] (rev 01)
      Subsystem: AMBIT Microsystem Corp. AR5BXB63 802.11bg NIC [1468:0428]
      Kernel driver in use: ath5k
  

• 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

You can use lshw which is CLI tool:

sudo lshw

as the man page says:

lshw is a small tool to extract detailed information on the hardware configuration of the machine. It can report exact memory configuration, firmware version, mainboard configuration, CPU version and speed, cache configuration, bus speed, etc. on DMI-capable x86 or IA-64 systems and on some PowerPC machines (PowerMac G4 is known to work).

You can also use HardInfo:

HardInfo can gather information about your system's hardware and operating system, perform benchmarks, and generate printable reports either in HTML or in plain text formats.

It can also be easily extended, for developer documentation and full source code (released under GNU GPL version 2) is available.

Install it by running this command:

sudo apt-get install hardinfo

or look for hardinfo in Synaptic or Software Center.

Answer 3

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

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 (needs install)

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 4

lshw is a very good command that tells you a very detailed information of your hardware. If you don't want to install something else like hardinfo then it will be very good command. But use lshw (you can say list hardware to remember this command) with -html or -xml options to get the information in more interactive way.

Here it illustrates

    $ sudo lshw | less (or more)
    $ sudo lshw -html > myhardware.html
    $ sudo lshw -xml > myhardware.xml

Now just open .html or .xml files created in your current directory to get a complete description of your hardware.

Answer 5

lshw is the command, you can grep also, lshw | grep audio for example.

I don't know how you can view it in the GUI.

Answer 6

lspci - PCI hardware

lsusb, lspcmcia, lshw, lshw-gtk

dmidecode -information about your system's hardware as described in system BIOS

kinfocenter

cat /proc/cpuinfo

Answer 7

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.

Answer 8

from the terminal:

sudo lshw

from the gui you'll need to install gnome-device-manager

Answer 9

Other great tools for Ubuntu are

i-nex

I-Nex is free system info tool which is used to gather information on the main system components (devices) such as CPU, motherboard, memory, video memory, sound, USB devices and so on. The application allows through a tabbed clear interface to display information about the system hardware, this utility displays significant amount of system details. I-Nex utility continues to add new functionality, this time I-Nex included GPU information tab, and other various fixes. Besides being able to display hardware information, I-Nex can also generate an advanced report for which you can select what to include and optionally send the report to a service such as Pastebin (and others). It also features an option to take a screenshot of the I-Nex window directly from the application. The difference between I-Nex and the other hardware information GUI tools available for Linux is that the information is better organized and is displayed faster (than lshw-gtk for instance). Also, the hardware information is presented in a way that's easier to understand than other such tools.

cpu-g

CPU-G is useful utility to show hardware information. It detects hardware and display details about everything, it shows information about CPU(Processor), RAM(Active/Inactive, Free, Used and cached), Motherboard and Chipset, Bios Details, Graphic card details, and details of installed Linux.

SOURCE http://www.noobslab.com/2014/01/cpuz-alternatives-inex-cpug-for-ubuntu.html

Answer 10

Device Manager from the Ubuntu Software Centre.

Answer 11

Install Sysinfo from the Ubuntu Software Center. Sysinfo is a graphical tool that is able to display some hardware and software information about the computer it is run on.

It is able to recognize information about:

• System (Linux distribution release, versions of GNOME, kernel, gcc and Xorg and hostname)
• CPU (vendor identification, model name, frequency, level2 cache, bogomips, model numbers and flags)
• Memory (total system RAM, free memory, swap space total and free, cached, active, inactive memory)
• Storage (IDE interface, all IDE devices, SCSI devices)
• Hardware (motherboard, graphic card, sound card, network devices)
• NVIDIA graphic card: only with NVIDIA display driver installed

Answer 12

I wrote a shell script to gather all possible hardware details on Linux systems, including Ubuntu, using native commands. Anyone interested can view and download the script from: A simple shell script to get hardware info from a Linux box.

This script fetches the following details:

• Operating system (Linux) release version, kernel version, uptime details, etc.
• System (server) vendor, serial number, etc.
• Server mainboard details
• Server BIOS at a glance
• Server processor details
• Server physical memory (RAM) details
• PCI devices/controllers at a glance
• Hard disk drive details
• Network hardware info

Answer 13

Add some detail:

• lscpu display information on CPU architecture
• lsblk list block devices
• sudo lshw -short | grep -i "system memory" list system memory

Just type ls and use tab to get prompt.

Answer 14

Is there a single utility to monitor most hardware's working status? Just like some software in Windows?

If you search for "system testing" in dash you will see a program that will check an insane amount of features. The 2nd image shows it will check suspend, power management, audio, usb, graphics, mediacards, dvd drives and much more.

If something is wrong related to a device it will inform you of it. A simple search on AU or posting a question specific to a problem shown at the results page should help investigate the related problem.

Answer 15

NeoFetch is a nice command line solution for high level information (if running Ubuntu 14.04 or higher).

To install you need to add the PPA first:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:dawidd0811/neofetch

Then install:

sudo apt update && sudo apt install neofetch

Then run:

neofetch

Answer 16

The Universe repository on Ubuntu 14.04 and later contains a Bash script named inxi in package with same name. At least Xubuntu 16.04 has it installed by default. You can control its output via options. See man inxi. E.g. inxi -v 2 shows information in verbosity level 2; levels 0-7 are supported.

Answer 17

HW Probe Tool: https://github.com/linuxhw/hw-probe

The tool creates probes of the computer that includes outputs of hardware "listers" (hwinfo, dmidecode, biosdecode, etc.), several Linux diagnostics tools (smartctl, memtester, etc.) and system logs (dmesg, Xorg.log, etc.).

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

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