lshw is a small tool to extract detailed information on the hardware
configuration of the machine. It can report exact memory configuration,
firmware version, mainboard configuration, CPU version and speed, cache
configuration, bus speed, etc. on DMI-capable x86 or IA-64 systems and
on some PowerPC machines (PowerMac G4 is known to work).
dmidecode is a tool for dumping a computer’s DMI (some say SMBIOS) ta-
ble contents in a human-readable format. This table contains a descrip-
tion of the system’s hardware components, as well as other useful
pieces of information such as serial numbers and BIOS revision. Thanks
to this table, you can retrieve this information without having to
probe for the actual hardware. While this is a good point in terms of
report speed and safeness, this also makes the presented information
possibly unreliable.
des 29 2007
