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[jbillingsle01]

Hello,

I'm a newbie and I recently inherited a unix server. I'm trying reverse engineer somethings, but it's pretty difficult. Is there a command that will tell me what distro my server is running or what kernal it's running?

[Marsolin]

"uname -r" should give you the kernel version. I'm not sure on the distro. Check for the existence of a /etc/debian_version file to see if it is Debian based.

[Cabhan]

Indeed: determining the distro can be difficult.

Some distros use special kernels. 'uname -r' may give you some information (for example, mine is: "2.6.17-gentoo-r8"). Alternatively, you can search for the existence of distro-specific files or directories:

/etc/portage/ = Gentoo
/etc/urpmi.conf = Mandriva
/etc/yum.conf = Fedora Core
/etc/apt.sources = Debian-based
/sbin/yast2 = SuSE

These are not 100%, since you can, for instance, install Apt on Fedora Core. However, they will generally give you a good idea.

[drl]

Hi.

The kernel as noted with uname.

I usually look in /etc for anything that has version or release in the name. Some distributions might have lsb-release, which, on my system, has the content below ... cheers, drl

     /etc/lsb-release
     1  LSB_VERSION=2.0
     2  DISTRIB_ID=Xandros
     3  DISTRIB_RELEASE=3.0.2
     4  DISTRIB_CODENAME=Xandros
     5  DISTRIB_DESCRIPTION="Xandros Desktop OS"