Is there a command line tool that shows whether the system is 32/64 bit, and possibly the CPU Mhz?

cat /proc/cpuinfo

Hiya! You might like the 'lshw' command too, which if not included in your Linux, can be gotten from Sourceforge.net and other places. It will give you some CPU info among other things.

You can also try the uname command ("man uname" for details)

processor type:
uname -p
even more info (processor type, kernel version, etc.)
uname -a

are both helpful a times.

"cat /proc/cpuinfo" works but has a lot of info that you may not be looking for.

Also, uname will give you the MHz that the cpu is rated for (max MHz) while /proc/cpuinfo will give you the current MHz (if you are using power saving features like frequency scaling and such).

Also, /proc/cpuinfo will also be more obvious about multiple cores and such (you'll get severeral cpu's worth of information).

Finally, if you want to check that you have a 64 vs. 32 bit chip in there, you have to look for the model name (you can get this from either the uname command as part of the "uname -p" output, or from the "model name" line in /proc/cpuinfo) and then go to the manufacturer website and find out what that chips specs are. As far as I know, this doesn't show up in /proc/cpuinfo (at least not on my machine).

I get
"Genuine Intel(R) CPU T2250 @ 1.73GHz"
from either method. It's the T2250 that is important ... google for it and you'll find that it's only 32 bit ... oh well.