I’d prefer to avoid a C extension library if possible; Linux
lets me do
this by reading all the data from /proc. In fact, I’m not
sure if there
is any other way to get a lot of the hardware information.
How do other
UNIXes let you get things like processor model/speed, memory
information, etc?
I realized I didn’t really answer this question. I meant it might be
possible to use a builtin lib in Linux instead of manual parsing. I’m not
sure. Solaris has various C libs that provide an interface to /proc - you
can’t parse it manually. I don’t exactly which lib(s) offhand, but they’re
there. As for other platforms - I don’t know. 
Regards,
Dan