[NTLUG:Discuss] The Linux capability that reveals your system

[Robert Pearson]

On 4/8/09, Chris Cox <cjcox at acm.org> wrote:
> On Wed, 2009-04-08 at 14:34 -0500, Ted Gould wrote:
>  > On Tue, 2009-04-07 at 23:17 -0500, Chris Cox wrote:
>  > > Ted Gould wrote:
>  > > > On Tue, 2009-04-07 at 18:46 -0600, Allen Meyers wrote:
>  > > >> I do not need a windows control panel but would be nice to get a glimpse of
>  > > >> system and possibly a clone for device manager, Please do not tell me I need
>  > > >> to reinstall windows
>  > > >
>  > > > HAL contains all of the information that you're looking for.  That's the
>  > > > hardware abstraction layer.  A tool that I like to view HAL is
>  > > > gnome-device-manager.  If you're more of a commandline type of guy you
>  > > > can just do lshal and you'll get more data than you wanted :)  lshal
>  > > > does have filters if you read the man page.
>  > >
>  > > hal is an abstraction.  A layer.  But, when available, it's fairly
>  > > complete... but not necessarily complete.
>  > >
>  > > Just fyi.
>  >
>  > Oh!  I didn't know that, I've never noticed anything missing in HAL,
>  > what am I missing?
>
>
> Depends.  Basically anything for which drivers don't  communicate
>  something onto the dbus about the device.
>
>  With that said, there are some pollers in the hal daemon I believe
>  to try to find certain things (polling being... in general, a bad
>  thing).  My point is that it's NOT the source of the info, but
>  a populated area.
>

What do you use or see used mostly for "Configuration at a Glance"?
My "Operational Definition of Configuration at a Glance" is like what
Belarc Advisor does for Windows PCs. Really nice.
<http://belarc.com/free_download.html>

For the Electronic Inventory program we had a giant script that
gathered this information daily. Very handy for Recovery. I worked on
an early version of Cfengine as a replacement for the giant script
until management killed the project. I felt Cfengine had, or has, a
lot of promise but it is not for the faint of heart.