Is there a good way for me to discover all of the features regarding my hardware? The reason I am asking is because I want to slim down my kernel and all the compiled modules. For example, what type of SpeedStep feature is my Centrino Duo processors equipped with? What type of SATA technology is my drive using? Is the video card on my laptop using an AGP or PCI interface to the mainboard, etc...? The manufacturer website sucks at giving me these type of specs and I was wondering if there is better way to find all these features and layouts from the console.

dmesg will give you a lot of that info...

'dmesg' helps somewhat but I need more nitty-gritty details (eg. SpeedStep type on the Centrino Duo.) Is there anything else I can use?

yeah I doubted it would provide that particular nugget of info...

I googled "cpuz linux" (cpuz is what I'd recommend for windows, you could try it under wine I guess) and found this forum thread with a few ideas:

/proc/cpuinfo
hwinfo <-- might have to download
lspci
lshw , lshw --short <-- this one looks most promising, at least from the debian package description. the homepage won't load atm though.

Thanks for the pointers. The hwinfo in Portage (I am using Gentoo) is masked/unusable. This leads me to believe there is a better Gentoo alternative but I can't find it yet. I should find it though after some more searching.

I am using Gentoo and have unmasked hwinfo manually. I installed hwinfo version 8.38. The reason why hwinfo is masked is because it uses SUSE proprietary commands to access certain pieces of information. I despise people that uses SUSE and OpenSUSE. lshw seems to use the Linux way.

FYI, SATA has only one technology which is SATA. Instead of looking what SATA technology. Look at the controller. For Intel mobile processors, it is going to be always Intel.

Not everything can be compiled as modules. To really slim the kernel down in both in size and memory, try -Os. Though -Os may screw up many utilities. It does screw up compiling gstreamer and gnome to point that they error during compiling.

Thanks for the additional info; lshw does the charm for me. I have a Lenovo T60p and it has been hell trying to get everything working on Gentoo but I have learned alot using it. I resisted installing SUSE on it even though it has better support from Lenovo. YaST/YOU is crap anyways; viva la Portage.

Now I just need to get my fingerprint reader and additional thinkpad keys working.