Hardware

If you are having trouble configuring your hardware or just want to know what hardware is in your system, use the Hardware Browser application to display the hardware that can be probed. To start the program from the desktop, type hwbrowser at a shell prompt. As shown in Figure 5-2, it displays your CD-ROM devices, floppy disks, 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 will be displayed.

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:

01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: Matrox Graphics, Inc. MGA G400 AGP  \  (rev  04) (prog-if 00 [VGA]) Subsystem: Matrox Graphics, Inc. Millennium G400 Dual Head Max Flags: medium devsel, IRQ 16 Memory at f4000000 (32-bit, prefetchable) [size=32M] Memory at fcffc000 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=16K] Memory at fc000000 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=8M] Expansion ROM at 80000000 [disabled] [size=64K] Capabilities: [dc] Power Management version 2 Capabilities: [f0] AGP version 2.0

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

Figure 5-2: Hardware Browser