As a computer refurbisher and an open source advocate I’m always looking for open source ways of doing things proprietary software does well. One of the shareware dos-based tools I’ve used in the past is a system specification program called Astra (a 32-bit Windows version exists as well). Astra is an excellent tool (not perfect though) but being an open source zealot I wanted to find a similar way to generate a system report. It turns out Ubuntu (and probably a number of other Linux distributions) already has such a program, lshw. lshw is a command line tool to generate information about a system unit. One of the cool things lshw can do is create a html formatted report that gets redirected to a file you can read with Firefox or any other web browser.
Firefox showing lshw html formatted specs
The command to create a file like the one above is:
sudo lshw -html > myspecs.html
Then simply run Firefox and load the myspecs.html file you’ve just created. lshw also has a graphical cousin lshw-gtk which isn’t installed in Ubuntu during a default install, but can be installed after.