EXPLAIN: What is DMESG?
October 12, 2005 by Jon
Filed under Explanation
Reader Geoff brought up a good question the other day. He asked how to find all the text that screams up the screen while a GNU/Linux box is booting.
The short answer is: type
dmesg
in a terminal window.
The slightly longer, and undoubtably more informative answer I found contained in an article entitled DMESG Explained from the Linux Gazette.
There’s a whole schwack of information in that article about what DMESG really is and how to read its output, such as:
The Linux kernel is the central interface between the user and the hardware. As such, it has to incorporate support for hardware if you are to use it. Often, though, cryptic device names are used by the system, making it difficult at first inspection to determine if some particular hardware is supported. The command ‘dmesg’, which is used to print kernel messages, is very useful in determining if a piece of hardware has been found, and if so, what the system is referring to it as.
If your goal is to see if a PCI or USB piece of hardware has been detected, you may be able to use lspci or lsusb while the machine is running.
Enjoy!
