MX Linux Forum

I've checked, and there's two things going on, which it's important not to confuse:

1. not all systems have serials, I double checked, and two of mine have never had them. One has, and does not show it with 4.16 kernel, it did with previous one, I think 4.13.

2. other systems do have serial, but the file inxi reads is read only for root, which you can verify on your systems by simply running:
sudo inxi -Mxxx

3. some systems have the file, and have it as root read only, but it's still empty.

If an old inxi showed no serial, it probably never did.

This is on a computer by computer basis, some will have serials, some will not, some will have root read only serials now, and some I've seen as of 4.15 seem to show user serials.

inxi has changed a bit, it used to show nothing at all if not serial, that is, serial only showed if a valid entry was there, but now it shows N/A if no data was found. So it stands out more on recent inxi's than old ones. Technically I could add in tests there to see if the file exists but is not readable, with a <root> flag added.

pinxi 3.0.08-05 has this fix, which is quite easy to do:
My system is one of the ones with the board_serial file, but only root readable, and empty. So inxi can't see as user if it has content, unless I can measure the true size somehow, but the size comes in at 4 kb whether it's got an empty space or the actual serial in it from what I can see.

Yes, I'm liking Perl inxi, lol, everything is so much easier to work with and on...

Interesting.
Running inxi as root shows machine and motherboard serial numbers.
Nice to know how to get them.

Next inxi will show the <root required> message when it can't read any machine field. pinxi does that now.

That's a really nice touch,
along with all the others.
Thanks.

This /sys permission fix is in inxi 3.0.09.

Along with new weather units, which default to metric (imperial), cf, but which can be switched to suite taste: cf - metric/imperial; fc - imperial/metric; f - imperial; c - metric. Note that I can't quite figure out as a resident of the usa why our units are called 'imperial', that strikes me as a singularly dated term, but there it is. c is for centrigrade, f for fahrenheit, obviously. Switchable via --weather-unit flag, or config option: WEATHER_UNIT

Pedantic side note - Temperature has been known as Celsius officially since 1948. It is technically correct to say it is a centigrade scale as it means divided into 100 units, but it's officially Celsius.
https://www.thoughtco.com/celsius-vs-centigrade-3976012

that was a mental slip, I mean Celsius. I'll have to double check docs to make sure I didn't accidentally type Centigrade

Now the rest of the world needs the USA to switch to Celsius so we can talk about the weather with you! :D

I was in a Fortune 500 Company in the 1980's that was going to switch to Metric. Huge Teams and projects. I still have the logoed polo shirt. Never went anywhere close to completion.