Reading the BIOS content of a motherboard is not a trivial task. This is useful, for example, when you need to find out the "mobo" name or BIOS version without having to install any utilities, and it works from under any *nix system (be it FreeBSD or Debian, and I'm sure under RHEL and Gentoo too).
So:
# dd if=/dev/mem bs=64k skip=15 count=1 | strings | less
This will output the ASCII view of the BIOS through less. Among the "garbage" and "hieroglyphs" you can spot meaningful phrases like "O.E.M. Manufacturer", etc.
Scroll down looking for what we need. For example, if we come across the line "P5Q-VM DO", there's no doubt - that's the name of our motherboard.
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