Linux security

Inxi – tool to check hardware information on Linux system

It is usual that some user on Linux systems struggle to find what hardware specs are on their systems. There is an entire ocean of commands to check hardware information as well as quite a few gui tools like hardinfo, sysinfo etc on the desktop, but having a generic command line tool is far more useful. Here is the great tool I have discovered just by accident – Inxi. Inxi is a set of scripts that will detect a whole lot of information about the hardware, including vendor details, device driver configuration etc. And most importantly, it will print everything in easy to read format.

# Ubuntu/Debian users
$ sudo apt-get install inxi
# CentOS/Fedora users 
$ sudo yum install inxi

If inxi is not present on your distro, then install it by following the instructions here https://code.google.com/p/inxi/wiki/Installation How you use it – Inxi comes with plenty of options, my favourite and simple use is this command line:

$ inxi -c 5 -b
- c is for color output and you can use number from 0 to 32
- b is for basic info which has enough information about system to start

Here are some uses of inxi command:

# List basic info
inxi -c 5 -b
#List Sound card info
inxi -AG
#list ip address and network cards details (both wan and lan)
inxi -ni
#Print out the information about hard drive partitions
inxi -p
#Show motherboard, Bios, S/N
inxi -M 
#more than Basic (-b) but it does not include everything that inxi is capable of reporting
inxi -Fi
#Show distro specific information on the system 
inxi -r

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