Comments on: Linux Quick Tip – Find What Distro You’re On

By: Alain Kelder

Alain Kelder — Fri, 07 Dec 2007 20:05:18 +0000

BTW, ‘lsb_release’ didn’t work for me on Debian 4.0 (Etch)

Alain Kelder — Fri, 07 Dec 2007 19:59:55 +0000

Yeah, doesn’t seem like there’s a standard method that works across all Linux distributions. Found this list on the webmasterworld forum:

Novell SuSE
/etc/SuSE-release

Red Hat
/etc/redhat-release, /etc/redhat_version

Fedora
/etc/fedora-release

Slackware
/etc/slackware-release, /etc/slackware-version

Debian
/etc/debian_release, /etc/debian_version,

Mandrake
/etc/mandrake-release

Yellow dog
/etc/yellowdog-release

Sun JDS
/etc/sun-release

Solaris/Sparc
/etc/release

Gentoo
/etc/gentoo-release

jason — Thu, 06 Dec 2007 23:57:51 +0000

Hey Alain that will give you the version you’re on but how would you know what distro you’re on?

alain — Thu, 06 Dec 2007 02:41:26 +0000

This also works..

openSUSE: cat /etc/SuSE-release
Debian: cat /etc/debian_version