Retrieve System Information

As usual with Linux (and Windows in some cases) there are multiple ways to accomplish the same task but here is one for getting information on disks, usb devices, etc. attached to your computer.

user@machine:~$ sudo lshw

The listing can be quite long so don't forget to run it with the less, more or grep if you just want to see if a particular device is installed. For example if I wanted to check if one of my PQI mini-flash memory sticks was installed.

user@machine:~$ sudo lshw | grep pqi
vendor: pqi

If you're allergic to the command line use the GUI by installing lshw-gtk.