newbie: what does lspci tell me

[justaguy]

I am putting together my first system. It will have an AMD processor and SATA drives, and will run CentOs. I am in the process of purchasing hardware and am looking at your hardware compatibility forum. Many of these listings are the output of the lspci command. About lspci Wikipedia says: lspci is a command on Unix-like operating systems that prints detailed information about all PCI buses and devices in the system.

How does this tell me if the hardware is compatible? What about non-pci devices like SATA drives? How will it tell me how to get linux to recognize the component?

If the answer to this questions lies somewhere else, I apologize in advance. Please let me know where and I will RTFM.

Thank you in advance,
Ken

[Michael]

Well, lspci tells you more about identification rather than solely compatibility. For the measurement of GNU/Linux compatibility you must largely rely upon the user comments section. Once you believe you have finalized on the components you intend to use, feel free to post the list on the forums and I am sure some would be willing to comment on them.

[justaguy]

If the lspci command just has identification and the comment sections tell the reader that the component is in fact Linux/GNU compatible, why are there many entries with no comment?

[Michael]

If the lspci command just has identification and the comment sections tell the reader that the component is in fact Linux/GNU compatible, why are there many entries with no comment?

Not too sure... lazy posters? User overlooked comment area? Or perhaps the users just post the lspci output to acknowledge they had no problems.