PC Hardware in a Nutshell, 3rd Edition

Viewing resources with Linux

Viewing resources with Linux is straightforward. If you use KDE, simply open the KDE Control Center, expand the Information branch in the left panel, and double-click an item to view the details. (If you use Gnome, simply open a terminal window and type kcontrol to start the KDE Control Center. Figure 1-14 shows the KDE Control Center displaying the I/O ports in use on this system.

Figure 1-14. Using the KDE Control Center to list I/O ports in use

If you run Linux without a GUI, do not have KDE installed, or simply prefer using a command line, change to the /proc directory, which contains numerous descriptively named hardware configuration files. Use the cat command to display the appropriate file. For example, the command cat interrupts lists the interrupts in use. For larger files, use the more or less command to prevent data from scrolling off the screen.