2 Open-Source Alternatives to Everest (Complete System Information)

The 2 below tools are capable of performing an extensive and detailed analysis of your PC, display information about hardware, software, network configuration, etc. You can do this easly under Windows with Everest but how about Linux? Recently I wanted something similar and found the below 2 applications (I wanted something with a GUI):

1. lshw with a GUI

lshw (Hardware Lister) is a small tool to provide detailed information on the hardware configuration of the machine. It can report exact memory configuration, firmware version, mainboard configuration, CPU version and speed, cache configuration, bus speed, etc. on DMI-capable x86 or EFI (IA-64) systems and on some PowerPC machines (PowerMac G4 is known to work).

Requirements

• Linux 2.4.x or 2.6.x (2.2.x might work, though)
• a PA-RISC, Alpha, IA-64 (Itanium), PowerPC or x86 based machine
• an ANSI (or close enough to ANSI compliance) C++ compiler (tested with GCC 2.95.4 and 3.2.2) for the (optional) GTK+ graphical user interface, y
• ou will need a complete GTK+ 2.4 development environment (gtk2-devel on RedHat/Fedora derivatives)

Information can be output in plain text, XML or HTML.

It currently supports DMI (x86 and EFI only), OpenFirmware device tree (PowerPC only), PCI/AGP, ISA PnP (x86), CPUID (x86), IDE/ATA/ATAPI, PCMCIA (only tested on x86), USB and SCSI.

You should already have lshw installed, but in case you don't you can install it manually (it should be in the repositories). For Ubuntu:

sudo apt-get install lshw

In case it's not even in the repositories, download it from here.

The Graphical User Intarface for lshw can be installed by typing this in a terminal

sudo apt-get install lshw-gtk

You can then run it by hitting Alt + F2 on your keyboard and then typing:

lshw-gtk

Then double-click each item to navigate.

2. HardInfo

HardInfo is an information tool and benchmarking tool for GNU / Linux.

It displays information about the following components:

* Processor
* Operating System
* Languages
* Sensors
* Filesystems
* Shared directories
* Screen
* Network Interfaces
* Environment Variables
* Users

Devices and their control:

* Kernel Modules
* PCI devices
* USB Devices
* Printers
* Input Devices
* Storage
* Memory

Benchmarking:

* Blowfish
* CryptoHash
* Fibonacci
* N-Queens
* FPU Raytracing
* FFT

You can download HardInfo from here. There are pre-compiled packages available for Parted Magic, Puppy Linux, Ubuntu, Debian, ALT Linux and Fedora and of course, source packages.