A very common question when we talk about hardware in Linux is how to get the vendor of our Linux system hardware and what is the firmware version installed on the system. This information can easily found by using the command dmidecode. Let us see how to get this information.
For example:-
# sudo dmidecode | grep -iA 5 vendor
Vendor: IBM Corp.
Version: -[MLE178BUS-1.75]-
Release Date: 06/06/2012
Address: 0xE0000
Runtime Size: 128 kB
ROM Size: 8192 kB
Here we grepped “vendor” from the output of dmidecode. “-A 5” is used to get 5 more lines after the grepped data.
Other way to use dmidecode command is as shown below. Here we used “-s” option to get value of specified option.
$ sudo /usr/sbin/dmidecode -s bios-vendor && sudo /usr/sbin/dmidecode -s bios-version
IBM Corp.
-[MLE178BUS-1.75]-
Usually dmidecode binary file exists under /sbin as we can see below.
$ which dmidecode
/usr/sbin/dmidecode
In case you do not find it in this path, then first search it on your system, otherwise you need to install it. Let us see what package provides dmidecode command.
$ rpm -q --whatprovides dmidecodedmidecode-2.11-1.el5
So you can go ahead and install dmidecode package for your system.