When troubleshooting problems or trying to configure hardware to work with your computer, it often becomes important to identify your hardware components as precisely as you can. This section documents some software tools that you can use to identify components of your computer.
One technique for identifying hardware components on your computer is to look for labels and model numbers. This is one of the best ways to identify the makes and models of external components such as monitors and printers.
Often it is possible to read marking on the internal components of your computer, such as your video card, network card, or sound card. In such cases you want to look for stickers or model numbers on the chips or circuit boards. One handy identifier is the FCC identifier, which is [WHAT? -- FINISH ME] However, in order to read these stickers you will usually have to open your case and pull out the hardware components, which is a bad idea unless you know what you are doing.
Opening computer cases and looking for identifying marks used to be a common strategy for identifying hardware. These days, software tools make identification easier and more accurate for most hardware, the exception being very old expansion cards (specifically, some modems and cards that use the ISA bus).
The kernel is a special program that is central to Linux. It controls your hardware, allocating resources such as CPU and memory to running programs so that your computer operates smoothly. A special directory named /proc lets you peek at the kernel's operations. The files in this directory reflect the state of the hardware, and information about all the running programs. To view these files, you can use less. This comes in very handy when you are troubleshooting problems, or when you and Linux disagree about your hardware. Here are a few useful files in /proc: