37.4. Hardware

37.4. Hardware

37.4. Hardware

If you are having trouble configuring your hardware or just want to know what hardware is in your system, you can use the Hardware Browser application to display the hardware that can be probed. To start the program from the desktop, select System (the main menu on the panel) => Administration => Hardware or type hwbrowser at a shell prompt. As shown in Figure 37.4, “Hardware Browser”, it displays your CD-ROM devices, diskette drives, hard drives and their partitions, network devices, pointing devices, system devices, and video cards. Click on the category name in the left menu, and the information is displayed.

Hardware Browser

Figure 37.4. Hardware Browser

The Device Manager application can also be used to display your system hardware. This application can be started by selecting System (the main menu on the panel) => Administration => Hardware like the Hardware Browser. To start the application from a terminal, type hal-device-manager. Depending on your installation preferences, the graphical menu above may start this application or the Hardware Browser when clicked. The figure below illustrates the Device Manager window.

Device Manager

Figure 37.5. Device Manager

You can also use the lspci command to list all PCI devices. Use the command lspci -v for more verbose information or lspci -vv for very verbose output.

For example, lspci can be used to determine the manufacturer, model, and memory size of a system's video card:


00:00.0 Host bridge: ServerWorks CNB20LE Host Bridge (rev 06)
00:00.1 Host bridge: ServerWorks CNB20LE Host Bridge (rev 06) 
00:01.0 VGA compatible controller: S3 Inc. Savage 4 (rev 04) 
00:02.0 Ethernet controller: Intel Corp. 82557/8/9 [Ethernet Pro 100] (rev 08) 
00:0f.0 ISA bridge: ServerWorks OSB4 South Bridge (rev 50) 
00:0f.1 IDE interface: ServerWorks OSB4 IDE Controller 
00:0f.2 USB Controller: ServerWorks OSB4/CSB5 OHCI USB Controller (rev 04) 
01:03.0 SCSI storage controller: Adaptec AIC-7892P U160/m (rev 02) 
01:05.0 RAID bus controller: IBM ServeRAID Controller

The lspci is also useful to determine the network card in your system if you do not know the manufacturer or model number.