How to gather system information

These instructions show how to gather system information about your computer. It is very important that you can provide the system information, when you're having trouble, so that we can investigate problems and find out what's going wrong.

Using Steam to gather system information

You can use Steam to collect system information about your computer.

1. Go to the Steam Help menu.
   
2. Pick System Information in the dropdown menu.
   
3. Right-click and select Copy all text to clipboard

Now that you have the system information available it's matter of what you want to do with it. You can paste it into a mail, create a text link with Hastebin[hastebin.com] (or any other such service) or look for the specific information that we're requesting.

[Larafan2009]

Do you have an email I can send it to?

[buzzmandt]

On Kubuntu KDE Plasma 5 you can turn off compositing and unhide the pop-up dialog by hitting alt+Lshift+F12. I don't know if other distros do this or if this is a plasma 5 thing

[atomic-penguin]

If you're using KDE 5, you can block compositing for the Steam application, so that it will unhide the copy pop-up dialog.

Click on the Steam window so it is in-focus. Hit `Alt-F3` -> More Actions -> Special Application Settings -> Appearances & Fixes -> Check Block Compositing -> Force -> Yes.

Restart Steam, and you should be able to hit Ctrl-A -> Right-Click -> Copy all Text to Clipboard

[wil]

Right-clicking on this window has no effect on my linux install. There doesn't seem to be any way to copy the info.

[gofynono]

when i right click nothing happens...

[ProfessorKaos64]

This gives pretty good output, hopefully it will be accepted for copy/paste in the future:

desktop@steamos:~/steamcmd-wrapper$ inxi -CGS
System: Host: steamos Kernel: 4.16.0-0.steamos2.1-amd64 x86_64 (64 bit) Console: tty 2
Distro: SteamOS 2.0 brewmaster
CPU: Quad core Intel Core i7-4790K (-HT-MCP-) cache: 8192 KB
Clock Speeds: 1: 1541 MHz 2: 1332 MHz 3: 1820 MHz 4: 1512 MHz 5: 1784 MHz 6: 1909 MHz 7: 1763 MHz
8: 1922 MHz
Graphics: Card: NVIDIA Device 1b80
Display Server: X.org 1.16.4 drivers: nvidia (unloaded: fbdev,vesa,nouveau)
tty size: 151x35 Advanced Data: N/A out of X

[ProfessorKaos64]

In SteamOS, went into desktop mode and started another instance of Steam to get the details to save to a GitHub gist, validation still fails with blank lines removed:

https://gist.github.com/mdeguzis/e3bf97186ff9b421a6332cc59a1d9e04

[Cy]

For SteamOS users there's an extra step to run desktop version of Seam client, quoting from the support page:

To access the SteamOS desktop, it must be enabled from the Steam Settings menu. Select Settings (the gear icon in the top right) then select Interface and check the "Enable access to the Linux desktop" box. Now the Exit button will have an additional option, "Return to Desktop" that will switch to the SteamOS desktop.

[hnqla]

I'm running SteamOS and this instruction does not apply - you are basically always in "big picture mode" and can't do as requested here. :(

[ProfessorKaos64]

This does not work for users that are on SteamOS. I would highly suggest this be scripted with something like Python or bash like what I have done here (but cut down):

https://github.com/mdeguzis/SteamOS-Tools/blob/master/utilities/steamos-systeminfo-tool.sh


Or, provide what is expected as a hover-over tooltip or caption that details what to give.