Sysinventory is a little piece of software of my own hand, that reports system inventory information. This includes hardware specs, like type and speed of CPU, amount of memory, etc. and also software data, like kernel version, installed version of certain software packages, etc. It is written as a collection of Zsh shell snippets (called modules). It can be compared best to Facter, which does roughly the same in essence, but is written in Ruby. I did’t know of Facter’s existence when I started Sysinventory, otherwise I might just have used that and extended it where necessary, but in the mean time, Sysinventory got a life of its own.
The first version dates from July 24th, 2008 and since then, quite some updates have been made. There is no information availabe online other than this posting, but there ain’t much to it. Just install and run it. It will report any information it finds on standard out.
Since version 0.1.19, Sysinventory has a configuration directory. There is one module, named package-generic, that uses it. It reports on whether a certain package is installed and if yes, which version. It was written to replace a number of modules, that did exactly the same thing, but for one particular packge only. The module tries to read a list of packages it should report on from a configuration file (/etc/sysinventory/package-generic). If the configuration file does not exist, the module doesn’t do anything. Empy lines in the configuration file are ignored.
Sysinventory is available in lenny-custom. Since it is a shell script, it runs on all architectures.
