How do I check what hardware components my system has?

On the Ubuntu Certification site (www.ubuntu.com/certification), the entries for systems contain a table of hardware components which were used in the system configuration which was Certified by Canonical. This is important to distinguish the system configurations tested with any other configurations that may be sold by the hardware manufacturer under the same name.

To find out what components your system has, there are a few useful commands available in Linux. To use them you will need to start a terminal instance (Ctrl+Alt+T) and type the appropriate command. If you're unable to reach the desktop environment, please try to switch to the virtual console with Ctrl + Alt + F1. If you don't have any type of Linux installed then you can make a Live CD or USB stick and run these commands inside the Live session.

The first one is 'lspci' which gives information about the components connected to the PCI bus on the system. Run:

  lspci

in the terminal for a simple listing. The most important items to look for here are your network card(s), graphics card(s) and media card reader - you can type the following commands to show these individually:

 * To show only the network related items, such as Ethernet and WiFi:
    lspci -nn | grep -i network

 * To show only your graphics cards:
     lspci -nn | grep '\[03'

 * To show only card readers:
     lspci -nn | grep -Ei "sd|mmc"

Some of the important hardware components of your system are on the USB bus instead of the PCI bus - this can include any built in webcams. Run:

 lsusb

in the terminal for a short listing.

To find out the type of CPU you have, the easiest way is to run:

  grep -i 'model name' /proc/cpuinfo

You should be able to use all of this information to make a comparison between the configurations shown on www.ubuntu.com/certification and the configuration you have.