I recently run into the need to know what components I have inside my box without going upstairs and grabbing the screwdriver and going back downstairs, starting to unscrew the case, maybe hurt myself while doing so, etc etc.

Under Windows there is the nice tool called Speccy doing that job. But what about my Ubuntu?

Its almost as easy as Speccy, called lshw (hardware lister)

  1. install it – It should be in the default Ubuntu repositories
    # sudo apt-get update;sudo apt-get install lshw lshw-gtk -y
  2. start the commandline tool
    # sudo lshw
  3. You might like to export the lshw report to a html document to store it somewhere for quick access.
    # sudo lshw -html > /tmp/your-file-name.html
  4. or alternatively because I love GUI’s
    # sudo lshw -X