You may at times need to know about the hardware information on your computer for many reasons, such as to find a correct driver or to check its hardware specification. In this article we list some of the method you can find the hardware specification in Linux.

Check the /proc folder

The /proc/ folder has many useful files to check hardware info. The most popular files are /proc/cpuinfo (about processor info), /proc/meminfo (about RAM memory) and /proc/partitions (a full list about all disk partitions). To check these files you can run the “cat” command to display these file info on the terminal. For example

cat /proc/cpuinfo 
cat /proc/meminfo
cat /proc/partitions

lshw

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

sudo lshw
sudo lshw -short

To find the info on one specific class wit lshw, say the processor, you can run the following command

sudo lshw -class processor

hwinfo

hwinfo is used to probe for the hardware present in the system. It can be used to generate asystem overview log which can be later used for support.

To install hwinfo in Ubuntu or other debian based distro run this command

sudo apt-get install hwinfo

hwinfo
hwinfo --bios

dmidecode

dmidecode is a tool for dumping a computer’s DMI (some say SMBIOS) table contents in a human-read‐able format. This table contains a description of the system’s hardware components, as well as other useful pieces of information such as serial numbers and BIOS revision. Thanks to this table, you can retrieve this information without having to probe for the actual hardware. While this is a good point in terms of report speed and safeness, this also makes the presented information possibly unreliable.

To install dmidecode in Ubuntu and other debian based distros, run the following command

sudo apt-get install dmidecode

To install dmidecode in Fedora,centOS, or RHEL run the following command

yum install dmidecode

To use dmidecode, you need to run the command as root. To get full report about hardware info, you can run the following command

sudo dmidecode

To get details about particular hardware classes you can run the commands like example below

sudo dmidecode -s chassis-type 
sudo dmidecode -s bios-vendor 
sudo dmidecode -s processor-version