As in any PC, you have Windows, MacOS or Linux, hardware problems can appear and you will have to find a solution. If you have a PC with Linux operating system installed, in this article we are going to teach you how to get all the possible information from your hardware to make it easier for you to locate the problem and thus be able to correct it in the best possible way.
Below we are going to teach you two methods to get the hardware information on your Linux computer, either by installing a monitoring application or by using commands. Go for it.
Your hardware information with HardInfo for Linux
There is an application that is available in the vast majority of Linux distributions called HardInfo, and that in true HWInfo style will show us all the information about the hardware we have on the computer.
Installation is very simple: just start the graphical interface and from the Software Center or Package Manager look for “hardinfo” (for some reason in Ubuntu it is called “System Profiler and Benchmark”) and install it on your system.
Alternatively, you can also install it from the terminal by typing “sudo apt install hardinfo”.
When you run the application for the first time, you will see a summary of your computer hardware. On the left side you can display all the sections to see specific information about each hardware component that you have installed on your PC.
In a similar way to Aida64, HardInfo also has a small benchmark tool that can be used both to see the performance of the equipment and to stress it and monitor temperatures or if you have problems. In the menu on the left, you can find it under the “Benchmarks” section.
Hardware information on the Linux command line
We are talking about Linux and, therefore, everything you could do in the graphical interface you can also do in the terminal. Next we are going to tell you what commands you can use to get all the possible information about your hardware.
lscpu
This command will show you information about the processor; it has no additional options or functionality.
lshw -short
This is a general-purpose utility that reports in detail but in summary all the hardware installed on the computer, such as the processor, RAM, storage, USB drivers or network adapters.
lspci
With this command, the system will show a list of all the PCI buses and the details of the devices connected to them, such as the graphics card, external network card, USB ports, SATA controllers, etc. You can filter the results with grep, for example putting lspci -v | grep “VGA” -A 12
Other useful commands
There really are infinite number of commands to get information related to hardware in Linux, although they are much more specific or concrete, but they can also be used to detect that hardware problem that is leading you and you do not know where it comes from. These commands are as follows:
- lsscsi – Displays information about the SCSI devices connected to the system.
- lsusb : Lists all the devices connected to the USB ports, as well as the system’s USB controllers.
- lsblk – Lists all information about partitions on hard drives and other storage devices, including optical drives.
- df -H – Shows all system partitions, their mount points, and the space available on each.
- fdisk : the well-known fdisk, equivalent to Diskpart in Windows, that not only serves to show all the information on partitions and system volumes, but also to make all the modifications you want to them.
- free -m – Displays the amount of RAM installed, free, and used.
- dmidecode : This command differs from all the previous ones, since it extracts the hardware information directly from the DMI tables.
- hdparm : Shows all the information of the SATA devices connected to the computer.
