Page 38 - DCAP106_OPERATING_SYSTEM_TOOLS

Unit 2: Red Hat Linux 9 Basics

Notes
Figure 2.12: Finding the Available Hardware

Source: http://flylib.com/books/en/1.65.1.26/1/
Area Description
CPU The type of CPU and the amount of processing load.
Memory The amount of memory installed on the system and its usage
pattern.
The disk capacities and their usage status.
Hard disk, CD-ROM, and
floppy drives
Network cards The network devices which are operational and their usage
statistics.
Mouse The kind of mouse being used by the system.

Keyboard The kind of keyboard being used by the system.
Display The display card detected by the system and its current usage status.

Various PCI and USB The various devices detected by the system.
devices

Sound The sound card detected and used by the system.

Operating system maintains some special files in a dynamic manner. A lot of information can
be found by using these special files. These files are located in the /proc directory. We call these
files special as operating system generates them “on demand”. Also, these files are not actually
available on the file system except when requested (for instance, by the ls /proc command).

The cat command can be used to view the contents of these files. On the other hand, we can make
use of a text editor like gedit.

CPU-related Information

We can find out the CPU information discovered by the operating system by displaying the
contents of the file /proc/cpuinfo. This is displayed as below:

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