Comments on: HowTo: Find Out My Linux Distribution Name and Version

By: Carlos Santos

Carlos Santos — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 14:50:08 +0000

Thanks :)

By: Betta

Betta — Mon, 26 Sep 2011 09:58:30 +0000

Thanks a ton…
lsb_release -a suited my requirements!

By: rude_ass

rude_ass — Fri, 23 Sep 2011 21:40:09 +0000

would you also like a foot massage with that ??

By: jp

jp — Tue, 20 Sep 2011 12:15:29 +0000

thank you for cat /etc/*-release
and lsb_release -a
very helpful

By: prasanna

prasanna — Mon, 05 Sep 2011 05:45:09 +0000

please send me linux versions and release dates

By: cm_R

cm_R — Sat, 30 Jul 2011 16:31:46 +0000

smarcell – you are so clever. I am in awe.

but when I type that into the little white box thing, it just says “cat /etc/lsb-release.d: Is a directory”

and I still have no idea what my OS is ;-P

more seriously:

maxx – no you don’t want to change these files or try; what you want to do is something like (just an e.g.) in

/etc/rc.local
#!/bin/sh
#other stuff will be here probably, put your stuff at the end

echo “Hello, you’ve just successfully gained access to Maxx’s computer” > /etc/motd
cat /proc/version >> /etc/motd
echo `uname -a` >> /etc/motd

and so on. you are printing text and the output of programs to the file /etc/motd using shell syntax (the little backticks mean “interpret as a command to run” and echo means “print this” and > means “create a file and send this to it” and “>> means append this to the end of this file”

generally, motd will be printed on login (“message of the day”, quite old school, some systems might not have it I guess. My Scientific Linux 6.1 does. I think ubuntu does. maybe not.)

if not, you can make it yourself and have it in everyone’s .bashrc by editing /etc/skel. For that matter you can put anything you want in .bashrc or .profile and it will run whevever a shell is opened (a bash shell obviously).

/proc isn’t usually somewhere you want to write, unless you know why you are doing it.

By: sams

sams — Mon, 18 Apr 2011 11:51:30 +0000

thank u .. it works

By: Bryce H.

Bryce H. — Sun, 17 Apr 2011 10:06:56 +0000

Oh it would be Gentoo. THANKS! answered my own question =P

By: Bryce H.

Bryce H. — Sun, 17 Apr 2011 10:05:03 +0000

I typed this in and it worked: cat /proc/version

And this came up : Linux version 2.6.34houkouonchi-web100-ioat-vlan (root@houkouonchi) (gcc version 4.1.2 (Gentoo 4.1.2)) #1 SMP Thu Oct 14 16:27:09 PDT 2010

What distro would this be??? I am running my linux through a data center that I have access to.

By: ravi

ravi — Tue, 29 Mar 2011 04:22:35 +0000

thnx… helps lot

By: vikash

vikash — Thu, 17 Mar 2011 12:13:17 +0000

Thanks for giving command cat /etc/*-release
Really this is useful

Thanks
Vikash

By: smarcell

smarcell — Wed, 23 Feb 2011 17:18:30 +0000

Also try:

$ cat /etc/[A-Za-z]*[_-][rv]e[lr]*

By: Bhaskar Rimmalapudi

Bhaskar Rimmalapudi — Thu, 27 Jan 2011 18:16:49 +0000

This solution works perfect.

uname -a

By: tommed

tommed — Wed, 22 Dec 2010 10:15:16 +0000

/etc/issue works for Debian too! I use something like this:

if [ "`cat /etc/issue | grep Debian | wc -l`" == "1" ]; then
echo "is debian"
else
cat /etc/issue # write out distro name

By: Roshan.Ahtina

Roshan.Ahtina — Wed, 08 Dec 2010 09:18:30 +0000

hi guys
please tyr
FOR UNIX:
#cat /etc/issue
#cat /etc/*-release
#cat /proc/version
#uname -a

FOR Debai/slackware:
#cat /etc/*version

By: Vivek Gite

Vivek Gite — Sat, 04 Dec 2010 12:14:36 +0000

Your distribution is RHEL and your kernel version is 2.6.9-34.0.1.

Both are different.

By: Pietro

Pietro — Sat, 04 Dec 2010 05:18:38 +0000

I’m on rhel .. if I type cat /etc/*release I get:
Red Hat Enterprise Linux WS release 4 (Nahant Update 3)

but if I type cat /proc/version I get:
Linux version 2.6.9-34.0.1.EL.ADSKsmp (root@oka) (gcc version 3.4.4 20050721 (Red Hat 3.4.4-2))

I’m confused :( so what’s my distribution??

By: takizo

takizo — Wed, 15 Sep 2010 08:11:47 +0000

Thanks. Was digging few old linux machines and found this works. Running very old ubuntu ;)

By: jamos

jamos — Tue, 13 Apr 2010 11:50:17 +0000

Hi Daniel, I think your solution will only give the hostname, Kernel, arhitecture etc, but NOT the “distribution name” as is quoted on the question. Havent checked on anyother distro, but at least thats what happens on my CentOS 5.4, the other solutions seem to work.

[root@myhostname ~]# uname -a Linux myhostname.mydomanin.com 2.6.18-164.el5 #1 SMP Thu Sep 3 03:33:56 EDT 2009 i686 i686 i386 GNU/Linux

By: Tibi

Tibi — Fri, 09 Apr 2010 08:09:48 +0000

Worked perfectly ;)