Linux Administration Cookbook

dmesg (and the kernel logs)

dmesg is a way to print or control the kernel ring buffer according to its manual but, to you and me, it's a great way to quickly see if your hardware was detected by the kernel as it's initialized.

Running dmesg will print to stdout, so it's handy to pipe it into less:

$ dmesg | less

Once done, you should be able to search for specific strings. Continuing with our theme, we're going to look for Intel and see what's loaded:

[    2.221242] e1000: Intel(R) PRO/1000 Network Driver - version 7.3.21-k8-NAPI

If we look for ATA, we can also see our disks being detected:

[ 0.940242] ata2.01: ATA-6: VBOX HARDDISK, 1.0, max UDMA/133[ 0.940248] ata2.01: 4194304 sectors, multi 128: LBA [ 0.940807] ata1.00: ATA-6: VBOX HARDDISK, ...