Newbie: how to find system information (and save it)

[MartienKNOP]

I am relatively new so maybe the answer is simple but cannot find it. Sometimes friends of mine ask me to reinstall windows and since Knoppix often still will find stuff like network devices etc when Windows doesnt' anymore I wonder if there is a tool that gives some system information about the hardware that has been installed, so that I know what drivers I will have to look for. If I could save the info as a textfile it is great but if only I could see it and write it down on an old fashioned piece of paper I am still a lucky man :) Thanks for any answer

[klaus2008]

You could use the program hwinfo.
hwinfo --help gives a short summary about the available options. You can save the system information in a log file. The following two commands create log files in the knoppix home directory.


hwinfo --log /home/knoppix/hardware-short.txt --short --all
hwinfo --log /home/knoppix/hardware.txt --all

[utu]

@klaus2008

Swell idea, Klaus, thanks.
In my case, your first command gives me a 650k file.

For a shorter 'hardware-short.txt', I put
hwinfo --short > /home/knoppix/hardware-short.txt
in my home directory. A 4k answer.

Then I view this with /System Tools/Log File Viewer,
adding this as a permanent choice on its menu on first viewing.

This makes very good use of an otherwise under-worked
Log File Viewer.

[klaus2008]

@utu

You can read the short info at the end of the "short" log file :)
There is a way to reduce the filesize of the log file.
hwinfo --debug 0 --all --short --log /home/knoppix/hardware-short.txtThis gives me a 71 k file (instead of 491 k).

[MartienKNOP]

Thank you for your quick answers - but an additional question rises : is this /home/knoppix/ directory somewhere on my harddisk? Otherwise it would not be possible to really save the file. I also tried yesterday to open one of the text editors and save some text on my hdd, although I had mounted it and removed the read-only attribute, as soon as I wanted to save the file the hdd simply didn't show up. As I said I am relatively new at knoppix and I had expected a kind of browse button like in windows, which give you the chance to change the drive and not only the directory.

[utu]

@MartienKNOP

Several suggestions, intended to be helpful:

1. Find out about 'persistent home' as a knoppix option.
2. Play around with a command-line console. See what you get
for ls -l, and df -h.
3. After doing so, come back and start new threads
(one each) with your new questions.