Hi,

I am having hard time finding which linux distro is installed on server...

I don't know how to detect which linux distro and version is installed on server, I am web developer and every here and there my customer provide me with their Linux root access and ask me to update php and mysql as my requirement, but I always get stuck with what distro they are using, all the can tell me is they are using RedHat ent or fedore or CentOS but which version or variant they don't know...

how can I detect that ... I generally run cat /proc/version to try to find this information, but its of no use as per my understanding ..

You could also try to retrieve some kernel information, but that might not be of much help either..the distributions don't have any "common" place to store the information in. But if it's some kind of RedHat-based thing, and uses rpm packets, you could try to look at what versions of the packages there are installed and compare them to what the distributions you mentioned include, to try and determine which version it is.

Alternatively you could ask the person who installed the system.

There might also be a file in /etc, e.g. Slackware has /etc/slackware-version (or something like that).

Hi,

thanks but uname -a returns the hostname entry with I guess processor architecture and some date ..


I need to update php installation there, and it says one of PHP as redhat ES ...
let me try to do that ...

any idea before I start that

thanks

Hi

Thanks Nylex I found "/etc/redhat-release" give major detail about os ..

Thanks a lot

For SuSe,

it will be in etc/Suse-release.

If it is giving some match levels also.. then it shows the no. of service pack installed in it.

Usually just try:

Thats cool , but I still feel Linux should made this information available with in /proc/version or some other system command for the matter ....