Sunday 20 March 2016

How to get BIOS information in Ubuntu

If you want to get all the BIOS information in Ubuntu, there is a handy terminal command you can use.

dmidecode - According to the manual, dmidecode is a tool for dumping a computer's DMI (some say SMBIOS) table contents in a human-readable format. Information such as serial numbers and BIOS revision. Thanks to this table, you can retrieve this information without having to probe for the actual hardware. While this is a good point in terms of report speed and safeness, this also makes the presented information possibly unreliable.

You need to first install dmidecode in your Ubuntu system to get the BIOS information. Use the following command:

sudo apt-get install dmidecode - It will ask for your root password.

ambarish@ambarish-ubuntu:/dev$ sudo apt-get install dmidecode
[sudo] password for ambarish: 
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree       
Reading state information... Done
dmidecode is already the newest version.
dmidecode set to manually installed.
0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded.

Once done successfully, use the following command to get the BIOS release date:


ambarish@ambarish-ubuntu:/dev$ sudo dmidecode --string bios-release-date
12/01/2006

Also, to get the other BIOS releated information, use the command sudo biosdecode. It will display the structure of your BIOS along with several other informations like Router ID, OEM identifier, No of structures and max structure size.

ambarish@ambarish-ubuntu:/dev$ sudo biosdecode
# biosdecode 2.12
ACPI 2.0 present.
OEM Identifier: VBOX  
RSD Table 32-bit Address: 0x7FFF0000
XSD Table 64-bit Address: 0x000000007FFF0030
BIOS32 Service Directory present.
Revision: 0
Calling Interface Address: 0x000FDA00
PCI Interrupt Routing 1.0 present.
Router ID: 00:01.0
Exclusive IRQs: None
Compatible Router: 8086:7000
Slot Entry 1: ID 00:01, on-board
Slot Entry 2: ID 00:02, slot number 1
....
Slot Entry 30: ID 00:1e, slot number 29 SMBIOS 2.5 present.
Structure Table Length: 450 bytes
Structure Table Address: 0x000E1000
Number Of Structures: 10
Maximum Structure Size: 255 bytes


I hope that helps. 

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