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.