Subtitles of the Movie

The Live Media Hardware Check. One of the important features of the Live CD is the ability to use it to check for hardware compatibility. This video may be a little difficult for some as it requires a little knowledge of the Command Line interface. Just a successful boot of the Live CD is sufficient to verify the compatibility of a number of hardware components, including the CPU, the CD/DVD Drive, and some devices connected as PCI Devices. With a little detective work you can also verify some more features of the CPU as well as the configuration of detected hard drives. I come here to a booted Live CD with the Live System User and I can find out a bit more information about this system by clicking System, About this Computer, and this tells me about the memory on the local system and the CPU. But to really learn more I need to go to the Command Line Interface, which I can start with the Applications, System Tools, Terminal Command, and here's my Command Line Interface with the Live User user. To find out more about the CPU, I run the proc Ð and sometimes the Live CD is a little sensitive to the keyboard Ð cpu info command. I see I have one processor here. If there were two processors, or a Dual Core processor, there would be a processor 0 and a processor 1. If you're interested in virtualization pay attention to these flags. If you have an Intel CPU, look for the vmx flag. If you have an AMD CPU, look for the svm flag. As you can see for yourself I don't have it here, which just goes to show not every CPU, even the latest CPUs, support the hardware virtualization which is prerequisite to Open Source Virtual Machine technology such as Xen and KVM, which is short for the Kernel-based Virtual Machine. Next, use the Command Line to identify local hard drives. You need root user privileges for this purpose and on the Live CD you don't need a root user password, so I run the su command, now I have root administrative privileges and I can run the fdisk Ðl command to list the partitions on detected hard drives. I see I have a hard drive here, and I have other devices here. If I have more than one hard drive and it wasn't shown my next step would be to power down the system and check physical connections to the hard drives, assuming the hard drive is internal. Now let's use the Live CD to check for more hardware. The lspci command Ð let's try that again Ð lists hardware detected and connected to pci ports including things like your video card, a SCSI card, Ethernet network devices, and audio devices. If you have ls, or USB on your system the lsusb command would do the same for USB devices, but I haven't configured it on this virtual machine so it returns a blank, and that's alright unless you actually have USB on this system, I which case you would check that hardware as well. More importantly, the output, especially to the lspci command can help you identify hardware and give you more information about drivers. For example, I've often used the lspci command to help me identify wireless cards and it's given me enough information to find and download associated drivers which work on Linux. OK, that's how the Live CD can help you check local hardware.