Linux admins have a love affair with information. The more information they can gather the better. And that’s a good thing, as the more informed you are, the more apt you’ll be to make smart decisions. This applies to administration tasks, security, development and just about anything else you can imagine.

You might need to get information about a CPU to find out if it includes virtualization support. Or maybe you gather information on total and available RAM. Do you know the manufacturer of your BIOS, its release number and the currently enabled options?

Fortunately, Linux has a good amount of commands for this very task. This guide, written by Jack Wallen for TechRepublic Premium, will introduce you to some of the most useful ones.

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MEMORY DETAILS

Next, you might want to find information about the installed RAM. You can start out by locating the amount of installed memory versus the amount of free memory with the command:

free -m

That isn’t going to give you much in the way of details about your memory. For that, you’ll turn back to the cat command and the /proc/meminfo file like so:

cat /proc/meminfo

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TIME SAVED: Crafting this content required 20 hours of dedicated writing, editing and research.