Getting Name of the distribution by using commands

[Valdis]

I am posting this thread for acquiring the certain information. I have recently jumped to Linux version. I hear that is good operating system for the newbie. Yes I am new to Linux world. There are several distributions in Linux. I don’t know about all of them. Is there any way to find out the name of the distribution by the use of commands? If it is not possible, then is there any alternative way to find those names. I will be very thankful if you suggest me here.

[Mariah-Simpson]

You can view the version and name of the distribution by using the command line terminal window. Type “uname-a “, this will return the current kernel version along with the other information. Also the command “uname-r” works as same as the above. I think this command won’t be able to display the SuSE 8.2 Professional distribution. But this command will give you very good clues for further information. For the “Distro” try to finger the host. Otherwise it will display its information at login time.

[Amma-Watson]

There are different way to find out the versions and names of the distribution you are currently using. By the use of your terminal window you can acquire the information by using different command. Each command will gives the output in different way. The different ways are

• From the Boot Time messages------ dmesg | head -1
• Using /proc/version---------------- cat /proc/version
• Using /etc/issue-------------------- cat /etc/issue

[Saura]

There are slight variations in the commands. Different distribution accept or response for different kinds of commands. The following code will only display the versions of /proc based Linux system.

/proc/cpuinfo

I tried this command on Solaris but it didn’t work. I didn’t try it in any other Linux Distribution so I don’t have any clue about this. Try also the following command for other Distro’s. I hope it will work.

lsb_release -a

[Mrigankasekhar]

Here is the Example for different kinds of distribution in Linux. Put this command on shell script and see what kind of output you are getting.
For Novell SUSE/etc/Suse-release
For Debian/etc/debian_version
For Ubuntu lsb_release –a
For RedHat cat /etc/redhat-release or /etc/redhat_version
For slackware/etc/slackware-version
For Fedora cat /etc/fedora-release
For Mandrake /etc/mandrake-release
For Solaris and Sparc/ etc/release
For Gentoo /etc/gentoo-release
Sun JDS/ etc/sun-release