System Information

If, like me, you've come from a Windows background, you may be missing some of those great utilities that do the work for you. I was reminded of one in particular while browsing Scott Mueller's (excellent) Upgrading and Repairing PCs this morning: CPU-Z. This is a peerless resource if you want to review system information in a Windows environment.

So, is there an equivalent for Linux?

Most experienced Linux users will get this information from the terminal and save themselves the bother of installing a new package. After all, it's a simple command and how often do you really need this information? Just open a terminal and type:

sudo lshw |more

If you prefer, you can pipe the output to a text file to make it easier to read and search:

sudo lshw |more >> /home/username/directory_name/document_name.txt

Just change the file path (the red text in the code example) to suit your particular location.
However, if you really are determined to have a utility that does all the heavy lifting and simply presents the data in a similar format to CPU-Z, give i-nex a look.

It's not, perhaps, as polished as CPU-Z but all the relevant data is there and it is easier to find than searching through the output from the lshw command. To install the package you also need to install the gambas3 package.

Open a terminal and type:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:nemh/gambas3
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:i-nex-development-team/stable
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install i-nex

Sources & References:

• CPUID: CPU-Z
• i-nex.sourceforge.net: Home
• Mueller S: Upgrading and Repairing PCs, 20^th Edition (p.72) (Amazon UK)