Easy questions

[charlie205]

I have some basic questions...thanks for the help.

I loaded Linux on a box of mine, if I recall correctly it was CentOS 4.4. How can you check what distro and/or version of Linux you are running? I already know to check the /etc/issue file, but I changed that a while back anyway.

Is there any good reason for upgrading to newer versions of CentOS, say version 5? If so, does anyone know of a guide I can follow which explains how to do the upgrade?

[techieMoe]

I loaded Linux on a box of mine, if I recall correctly it was CentOS 4.4. How can you check what distro and/or version of Linux you are running?

I'm not sure about which distro, but to check the verison of the Linux kernel you're using type this in a terminal:

uname -a

Is there any good reason for upgrading to newer versions of CentOS, say version 5? If so, does anyone know of a guide I can follow which explains how to do the upgrade?

I would generally recommend that unless there's a killer new application or feature in the newest version of your distribution that you cannot live without, you're not hurting anything by staying with an older version.

I've hosed installations before trying to have the latest and greatest. This sort of thing is a lot less common with CentOS or Redhat Enterprise since they primarily cater to large-scale company deployments where major changes are frowned upon. Personally, I'd stick with what works until you have a reason to upgrade.

[charlie205]

Over the last few months I've asked a few different people how to tell what distro you're running on the CLI. I always get basically the same answer; not sure. Does this not seem funny to anyone else? Why would it not be common practice to stick a readonly file somewhere that says "This is Redhat 6" or whatever?

[oz]

Lots of distros do put a text file in their distro (usually in /etc) that indicates which release you are using. In Arch Linux, it's found at: /etc/arch-release

It's easily accessed from the command line.

[charlie205]

Lots of distros do put a text file in their distro (usually in /etc) that indicates which release you are using. In Arch Linux, it's found at: /etc/arch-release

Awesome! I found it! On my system it's /etc/issue.net

Turns out I have CentOS 4.5

Thanks everyone