I’m in the process of rebuilding the kernel on my Debian Linux box and wanted to make sure when I rebuilt it, I had all the hardware info I needed. This included the 2 ethernet adapters that are installed. I remember when I first installed Debian, I had to get a special install disk because of ethernet hardware Dell used for its built in adapter. I couldn’t remember what it was, and I didn’t want to shut the machine down to look inside, so I did some digging on Google and came across this site which gave the following tip:

dmesg | grep eth0

which resulted in this

eth0: Tigon3 [partno(BCM95721) rev 4101 PHY(5750)] (PCI Express) 10/100/1000BaseT Ethernet 00:14:22:7a:a6:a6
eth0: RXcsums[1] LinkChgREG[1] MIirq[1] ASF[1] Split[0] WireSpeed[1] TSOcap[1]
eth0: dma_rwctrl[76180000]

Cool! The command dmesg prints or controls the kernel ring buffer. Just grep what you’re looking for an the information you need comes up.