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Question: How can I get information about hardware manufacturer, model name, serial number, BIOS information using Linux command line (CLI)?
Answer: You are welcome to use dmidecode which helps to get information about your system’s hardware as described in your system BIOS. That information typically includes system manufacturer, model name, serial number, BIOS version, asset tag as well as a lot of other details depending on the manufacturer.
Beware that DMI data have proven to be too unreliable to be blindly trusted. Dmidecode does not scan your hardware, it only reports what the BIOS told it to. Dmidecode was first written by Alan Cox and is now being further developed and maintained by Jean Delvare. It is released under the General Public License (GPL).
This tool can be easily downloaded from here (source code) or can be installed as binary package included into repositories of many distributions like Debian, Ubuntu, Gentoo. FreeBSD version is also available. Actualy it is reported that dmidecode works well on the following systems:
- Linux i386
- Linux x86_64
- Linux ia64
- FreeBSD i386
- FreeBSD x86_64
- NetBSD i386
- OpenBSD i386
- BeOS i386
- Cygwin i386
- Solaris x86 (CVS version)
In Ubuntu (my favourite distro) just execute the following: sudo aptitude install dmidecode (sample output is here).
Sounds interesting. Ive only been running Ubuntu for about 8 months now… can move around pretty good, but at first couldnt figure out how to run this. I installed it fine in the terminal, and then typed "dmidecode" in the terminal to run it but get this error:
dmidecode 2.9
/dev/mem: Permission Denied
I then did "gksudo dmidecode" and it worked fine.
you should use "sudo" instead of "gksudo".
gksudo is to ask you in GUI for password, but if you're in terminal without X you can't use that command!
Thank you, confiq, that’s what I wanna say
lshw does provide quite informative hardware info too, and can generate html format.
http://linux.byexamples.com/archives/340/how-to-generate-system-hardware-profile-for-your-laptop/
But recently lshw seems to acting up