The inxi command-line program provides detailed information about most of a computer's hardware components. To display the desired data, however, you need to pass in parameters to inxi in a terminal window. Inxi-gui [1], a small graphical front end for inxi [2] by the developers of the Korean-based HamoniKR Linux distribution (for Ubuntu, Linux Mint, and their derivatives), makes the whole process easier and faster.

Installation

To integrate inix-gui with your system, you can use the two commands from Listing 1. These commands simultaneously create a starter, which you can then click to run the program. Shortly, inxi-gui welcomes you with a self-explanatory interface without any gimmicks, listing various options one below the other (Figure 1).

$ wget -qO- https://pkg.hamonikr.org/add-hamonikr.apt | sudo -E bash -
$ sudo apt install inxi-gui

Figure 1: Restricting itself to essential elements, inxi-gui immediately finds the information you need about your system.

To call up information, you just need to activate the radio button to the left of an option you are interested in and then press OK. Besides calling inxi as its basic underpinnings, the inxi-gui front end also relies on various system utilities, each of which appears in the Command column with its parameters.

After enabling some commands, you may need to authenticate yourself as an administrator. Then, inxi-gui shows you the information for that specific command in the same window. You can save the data by pressing Save or return to selection mode by pressing Cancel.

For a full overview of all system components, enable the Full info option. You can then save the very detailed information that is displayed in an unformatted text file as documentation for your hardware and some installed software components. Use the integrated file manager to save the file in a directory of your choice. To exit inxi-gui, press the Quit button bottom right in the program window.

Alternative

The deb and RPM packages provide users with an older version, Inxi GUI [3], that offers a similar feature scope but uses another interface. To use this version, you also need to install the yad package on some distributions. You will find it in the package sources of the popular Linux distributions, and you can use the package manager for the install. Then launch Inxi GUI from your desktop environment's menu. The program opens a tiled window where each tile identifies different system components (Figure 2).

Figure 2: Even the older Inxi GUI interface gives you an at-a-glance overview of important components.

Of the 15 tiles available in the program window, 11 display information about the hardware components in an overlapping window after you click on the tile. This is not just the basic information, but it also includes optional data such as details of the technical standards supported by your CPU.

If no information about a component is available due to missing hardware, Inxi GUI displays a message to that effect. The Info tile also shows you some system information, such as the number of active processes, the memory usage, and the system's runlevel. You can exit the information window by pressing Ok bottom right of the window; this takes you back to the main window.

You can use the Save All tile to save all of the system information. The program shows you an additional dialog where you can select the save path. After choosing a subdirectory, the software saves the data there in a simple unformatted text file named inxi.

This file contains all the system data the inxi command-line tool found, including some information about software components such as the active X server, the existing OpenGL version, and temperatures, if your system has temperature sensors (Figure 3).

Figure 3: inxi's extensive report is also useful for documentation purposes.

Conclusions

Both inxi-gui and Inxi GUI, graphical front ends for the inxi command-line program, perform their task without requiring any training on the part of the user. Both packages provide details of the relevant hardware and system components, and the individual information plus a summary can be saved in a text file. This makes both tools suitable for administrators who use a Live USB to handle system maintenance tasks. This is also a useful approach to capturing a hardware overview on computers that use other operating systems without inxi-gui support.