How To Get Ubuntu Hardware Information Without Opening Your Computer

Hardware information can be quite hard to obtain for certain components of the system. Nonetheless, having the knowledge about what hardware your computer has can be helpful in avoiding system issues by verifying minimum system requirements for games, applications and other software before installing it.

dmidecode is a tool that provides  detailed description of  an Ubuntu system’s hardware, along with other important information such as firmware details and serial numbers. Such information is often required for updating associated hardware and software for a computer. With this tool you can get all the required hardware information imaginable for your Ubuntu Linux machine. I have tested it on Ubuntu but it should also work with other Linux operating systems like Debian.

The available information includes:

BIOS information, Vendor, release date, runtime size, ROM size, ISA, PNP, PCI, AMP, ESCD, CD boot, EDD, serial service, printer service, ACPI, AGP, USB (legacy), support information, serial numbers and much more.

Open a Terminal and enter the following command.

sudo dmidecode

This will display detailed system information within the Terminal window. You can  copy and paste the information to a word processor or text editor to get an elaborate overview of your system’s hardware.

 

The information obtained from dmidecode is so detailed that it might take you up to 30 seconds just to scroll down the terminal window to reach the end of the information.