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Award: Hottest Pick (Linux Format #84, October 2006)
Here's a situation you'll be familiar with, whether you're a new Linux convertee or a long-time user. You're on a web forum trying to fathom out a problem with your distro, and someone asks for the full details of your machine. Yes, they're trying to help, but it's difficult to give a complete answer. You'll have to poke around in the command line to work out exactly which versions of kernel, Glibc, etc you have, and then there are the revision numbers of your hardware devices to check! HardInfo is designed to accumulate all this information together in a neatly organised fashion.
Excelently, the HardInfo developers have created an Autopackage of the program, so you don't need to faff around with dependencies or building from source. Just copy hardinfo-0.4.1.x86.package from the LXF DVD to your hard drive, make it executable in your file manager (right-click and select Properties) and double-click on it to install. Alternatively, at the command line, enter sh hardinfo-0.4.1.x86.package to install it. Then you can run the software by entering hardinfo.
Despite the name, HardInfo doesn't just give information on your hardware, it also burrows around the system to determine your Linux distribution name and X server details. A handy Summary screen plucks out the most important details, but the tool goes into remarkable depth elsewhere: shared directories, available languages, USB devices, storage devices, hardware sensors and much more is covered in depth. The hardware info sections are much like the (in)famous Device Manager in Windows.
Already, HardInfo is a top utility for getting details on your system quickly. But it goes one step further with its benchmarking tools, which put your CPU through various chores (such as compressing data) to compare its results against other processors. You can get an idea of how your system fares against a Pentium 75 or an Athlon XP 3200, for example, and spot if something is clearly not working correctly.
Best of all, HardInfo generates HTML reports of all the information it identifies, so you can drop the report on to some free web space and get better replies when asking for help from fellow Linux users. Well worth having in your tool box!
(This text was written by Mike Saunders of Futurenet Publishing for Issue#84 of the Linux Format magazine. Copyright © 2006 Futurenet Publishing)
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