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+** INTRODUCTION **
+
+Dmidecode reports information about your system's hardware as described in
+your system BIOS according to the SMBIOS/DMI standard. This information
+typically includes system manufacturer, model name, serial number, BIOS
+version, asset tag as well as a lot of other details of varying level of
+interest and reliability depending on the manufacturer. This will often
+include usage status for the CPU sockets, expansion slots (e.g. AGP, PCI,
+ISA) and memory module slots, and the list of I/O ports (e.g. serial,
+parallel, USB).
+
+DMI data can be used to enable or disable specific portions of kernel code
+depending on the specific hardware. Thus, one use of dmidecode is for kernel
+developers to detect system "signatures" and add them to the kernel source
+code when needed.
+
+Beware that DMI data have proven to be too unreliable to be blindly trusted.
+Dmidecode does not scan your hardware, it only reports what the BIOS told it
+to.
+
+
+** INSTALLATION **
+
+The home web page for dmidecode is hosted on Savannah:
+  http://www.nongnu.org/dmidecode/
+You will find the latest version (including CVS) there, as well as fresh news
+and other interesting material, such as a list of related projects and
+articles.
+
+This program was first written for Linux, and has since been reported to work
+on FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, BeOS, Cygwin and Solaris as well.
+
+There's no configure script, so simply run "make" to build dmidecode, and
+"make install" to install it. You also can use "make uninstall" to remove
+all the files you installed. By default, files are installed in /usr/local
+but you can change this behavior by editing the Makefile file and setting
+prefix to wherever you want. You may change the C compiler and the
+compilation flags as well.
+
+Optionally, you can run "make strip" prior to "make install" if you want
+smaller binaries. However, be aware that this will prevent any further
+attempt to debug the programs.
+
+Two parameters can be set in the Makefile file to make dmidecode work on
+non-i386 systems. They should be used if your system uses the big endian
+byte ordering (Motorola) or doesn't support unaligned memory accesses,
+respectively. For example, compiling for a SPARC processor would require
+both (but I am not aware of SPARC-based systems implementing SMBIOS).
+Compiling for an IA64 processor requires the memory alignment workaround,
+and it is enabled automatically.
+
+
+** DOCUMENTATION **
+
+Each tool has a manual page, found in the "man" subdirectory. Manual pages
+are installed by "make install". See these manual pages for command line
+interface details and tool specific information.
+
+For an history of the changes made to dmidecode, see the CHANGELOG file.
+
+If you need help, your best chances are to visit the web page (see the
+INSTALLATION section above) or to get in touch with the developers directly.
+Have a look at the AUTHORS file and contact one of the maintainers.
+
+If you want to help with the development of dmidecode, please consider
+joining the dmidecode-devel discussion list:
+  http://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/dmidecode-devel
+
+
+** COMMON PROBLEMS **
+
+IA-64
+
+Non-Linux systems are not yet supported.
+
+MMAP
+
+Note that mmap() is now used by default wherever possible, since this seems
+to solve a number of problems. This default behavior can be changed in
+config.h. Just to make sure this is clear, mmap() is not used for performance
+reasons but to increase the number of systems on which dmidecode can be
+successfully run.
+
+CYGWIN
+
+Dmidecode was reported to work under Cygwin. It seems that /dev/mem doesn't
+work properly before version 1.5.10 though, so you will need to use at least
+this version.
+
+
+** MISCELLANEOUS TOOLS **
+
+Three other tools come along with dmidecode: biosdecode, ownership and
+vpddecode. These tools are only useful on systems with a BIOS, so they
+are not built on IA-64 by default.
+
+BIOSDECODE
+
+This one prints all BIOS related information it can find in /dev/mem.
+It used to be part of dmidecode itself, but as dmidecode was growing,
+we felt that the non-DMI part had to be moved to a separate tool.
+
+OWNERSHIP
+
+This tool was written on a request by Luc Van de Velde for use with Novell
+tools in his company. It retrieves the "ownership tag" that can be set on
+most Compaq computers. Since it uses the same mechanisms dmidecode and
+biosdecode use, and could be of some use for other people as well, we
+decided to make it part of the project.
+
+VPDDECODE
+
+This tool prints the contents of the "vital product data" structure as
+found in most IBM and Lenovo computers. It used to have a lookup table
+for the machine name, but it was unreliable and hard to maintain so it
+was ultimately dropped. It has a command line interface.