How to discover what Linux distribution is in use

Question

Sometimes I need to access some servers running Linux (or maybe another Unix-like SO), but I don\'t know how to verify which distribution is in use on the server (there are

Answer 1

This is, annoyingly, a harder problem than it appears.

For Linux systems, use lsb_release.

$ lsb_release --all
No LSB modules are available.
Distributor ID: Ubuntu
Description:    Ubuntu 8.04.1
Release:        8.04
Codename:       hardy
$ lsb_release -i
Distributor ID: Ubuntu

This has the limitation that lsb_release works only for Linux releases.

For all Unix systems, you can also parse up uname.

$ uname -a
Linux blue-laptop 2.6.24-21-generic #1 SMP Tue Oct 21 23:43:45 UTC 2008 i686 GNU/Linux

You can find some information about the systems and distributions at the uname Wikipedia page.