What type of ram do I have?

Problem: I wanna look at RAM I may be able to buy but I don't know what memory type I already have and even though my computer is right next to me it is still to far for me to go to to open up and see what type of ram it takes.

System details:
Ubuntu 9.04
uname -a: Linux Moneque 2.6.31-14-generic #48-Ubuntu SMP Fri Oct 16 14:04:26 UTC 2009 i686 GNU/Linux

Solution:
use lshw

tl;dr....sudo lshw


*nix Systems come with a bunch of ls things; lshw, lsusb, and lspci are a few that I know of. lshw will list everything your computer recognizes as part of it, though I donno if that's printers and the such as well. lsusb Will list the details of your usb bus bits. lspci Will list your pci devices, video cards and sound rcards, this includes pci-e.

to use lshw you can fire up a terminal and type

lshw

That will, at least on my system, probably cry about wanting to be super user.....

aggitan@Moneque:~$ lshw
WARNING: you should run this program as super-user.
moneque                   
    description: Computer
    width: 32 bits
  *-core
       description: Motherboard
       physical id: 0               

The information this displays is good enough for somethings, like if you want to know a bit about your processor and so on. However some details, like the memory type will be omitted.

To fix this we run it with sudo....

sudo lshw

and that should give us more details.....

aggitan@Moneque:~$ sudo lshw
moneque                   
    description: Desktop Computer
    product: System Product Name
    vendor: System manufacturer
    version: System Version
    serial: System Serial Number
    width: 32 bits
    capabilities: smbios-2.3 dmi-2.3 smp-1.4 smp
    configuration: boot=normal chassis=desktop cpus=2 uuid=A0E172FB-7331-DC11-8A81-001E8C259ED7
  *-core
       description: Motherboard
       product: M2R32-MVP
       vendor: ASUSTeK Computer INC.
       physical id: 0

Now, depending on your system you may get more information that can be displayed on your screen at any one time so you'll need/want to pipe the output to a file.

sudo lshw >> somefile

If the file doesn't exist it will be created and written to.

So as far as the memory problem goes we want the segment that starts with
*-memory, it will tell us: where the modules are, how big they are, and what type they are.

*-memory
          description: System Memory
          physical id: 45
          slot: System board or motherboard
          size: 2GiB
        *-bank:0
             description: DIMM DDR2 Synchronous 800 MHz (1.2 ns)
             product: PartNum0
             vendor: Manufacturer0
             physical id: 0
             serial: SerNum0
             slot: DIMM0
             size: 1GiB
             width: 64 bits
             clock: 800MHz (1.2ns)
        *-bank:1
             description: DIMM DDR2 [empty]
             product: PartNum1
             vendor: Manufacturer1
             physical id: 1
             serial: SerNum1
             slot: DIMM1
        *-bank:2
             description: DIMM DDR2 Synchronous 800 MHz (1.2 ns)
             product: PartNum2
             vendor: Manufacturer2
             physical id: 2
             serial: SerNum2
             slot: DIMM2
             size: 1GiB
             width: 64 bits
             clock: 800MHz (1.2ns)
        *-bank:3
             description: DIMM DDR2 [empty]
             product: PartNum3
             vendor: Manufacturer3
             physical id: 3
             serial: SerNum3
             slot: DIMM3

The important parts here are the descriptions, it looks like my system is rocking DDR2 and the modules I have are running at 800MHz. So I would want to look at getting more DDR2 RAM that operates at 800MHz