Every admin knows how to retrieve information about the system on which they are working. How many cores does the CPU have? cat/proc/cpuinfo! Is eth3 a gigabit interface? ip l sh! But instead of many tools, you can just use one: inxi. It is available via many package repositories (e.g., openSUSE, Debian, Ubuntu, and Linux Mint).
Suppose I need an overview of a machine with which I don’t normally work. Then, I call inxi without any parameters and get some basic information about the hardware (CPU, clock speed, RAM, and disk size) and the system (kernel and shell processes). If I want to see a few details, the -F parameter provides information on the video and audio hardware, partitioning, Swap, temperatures, and fan speeds (Figure 3).
If I’m only interested…