Reading BIOS information in Linux

A lot of information about a personal computer is stored as part of the BIOS and can be retrieved using data structures defined in the SMBIOS specification. On Linux operating systems, this information can be easily viewed using the dmidecode utility. This allows one to look up information such as system manufacturer, model name, serial number, BIOS version, asset tag, etc. Here is some sample output of this command running on a Lenovo ThinkPad:

The dmidecode package includes some other handy utilities such as biosdecode, ownership, and vpddecode. No need to turn the laptop upside down just to look up the serial number or model number.