Hardware

Hardware General

To find out which hardware is in front of you, you can use the command hwinfo. For an overview about the options, call

hwinfo --help

Hardware Compatibility List (HCL)

• Hardware Compatibility List and Product Reviews (www.linuxquestions.org).
• Hardware4Linux

Hardware configuration

• Hardware configuration
• Automatic Hardware Configuration tools.
• Linux for Macintosh

Futuristic Hardware

• Futuristic hardware

Linux On Laptops, Notebooks, PDAs and Mobile Phones

• Linux Laptop Wiki (www.linlap.com)
• Linux on Laptops (www.linux-laptop.net)

  Comprehensive guides to running Linux on various laptop models

• TuxMobil: Linux On Laptops, Notebooks, PDAs and Mobile Phones (tuxmobil.org)

Processors

• AMD's processors Athlon, Opteron, AMD64
• Intel's processors 80486, Pentium
• Motorola's processors m68k
• PPC

Hardware devices

Input devices

• Configuring mice (Serial, PS/2, USB)
• Configuring keyboards
• eGalax Touchscreen
• tv cards
• barcode Scanners

Graphics cards

• 3D graphics acceleration
• Installing ATI drivers - Howto on ATI drivers to give you hardware 3d acceleration.
• Installing NVIDIA drivers - Howto on nVidia drivers to give you hardware 3d acceleration.
• Installing intel-82865G drivers - How on the intel-82865G video adapter
• framebuffer device
• Configuring TV out
• Using multiple monitors with XFree86
• Video For Linux
• Tuning monitor output
• Matrox TV-out kernel patches

Sound

• Soundcard
• Open Sound System
• Advanced Linux Sound Architecture

Disks/Volumes

Hard drives

• ATA(IDE) - most common disks used today
• SCSI - usually found on servers
• SATA - serial ATA
• IDE Tree Mapping
• RAID
• LVM
• File Systems

Removable medium

• ATAPI
• DVD
• USB Flash drive
• floppy disks
• Music Player

Networking

• Networking
• Network device
• Network SWitch
• router

Printers

• Printing
• Troubleshooting printers

Scanners

• Scanners
• BarCode Scanners

Cameras

• WebCams
• Digital Cameras
• CamCorders

Hardware Interfaces

Busses

• PCI
• PCI-X
• PCI-E
• AGP - Accelerated Graphics Port. Interface for display cards.
• Firewire (400 and 800)
• USB - Universal Serial Bus
• IDE bus / ATA and ATAPI - used to connect hard drives
• PCMCIA - laptops addon cards
• IR - Irda (www.irda.org) infrared ports
• ISA
• EISA - turbocharged ISA implementation common in early 1990s PCs
• VESA Local Bus - on most 486 computers and a few Socket 4 Pentiums

Power Management

• ACPI
• APM

Tools/Tips

• lspci
• lsusb
• lsscsi
• proc - kernel handles about your system status
• cpuinfo - kernel handle about your CPU type and features
• hwinfo - get system info about your monitor or mouse type etc.
• dmidecode - read out your bios, e.g. computer type or support tag
• lm-sensors - CPU temperature, fan speed etc.
• kinfocenter - list of your hardware, e.g. usb media
• top - load of your hardware, top CPU consuming processes
• ksysguard - comprehensive overview about system load and much more
• xosview - lean overview about system load, network e.a.
• vmstat - system load, swapping etc. over a time frame
• Hotplugging hardware
• Quieting linux

See also

• areas
• Hardware compatibility list by the SUSE community