How do I know which distro I am running on?

[Bill Campbell]

On Fri, Feb 14, 2003 at 09:03:18AM -0600, Stuart Biggerstaff wrote:
>Good idea, since the other suggestions involve files that could be edited 
>to mislead.  That is, if the info gets into dmesg from the kernel, not just 
>from reading a file.  Of course if it does come from the kernel, the 
>information will be different for a non-standard kernel.

Looking at /proc/version on several systems here ranging from Caldera
OpenLinux 1.3 (yeah that old :-) -> Caldera 3.1.1 Workstation, Cobalt RaQ4,
and SuSE 8.1, this only has vendor info if one hasn't rebuilt the kernel.

Even with vendor kernels, there's a wide variety of kernel versions,
gcc/egcs versions, etc., and one would have to build a pretty complex
matrix to figure out which is which.

The automake, autoconf, libtool folks have been working on this problem for
years, and I think the best they've come up with is to identify that it's a
Linux system with some kernel revision level.

Is the /etc/*-release file part of the UnitedLinux or LSB standard?  If so
(and it seems like a Good Idea(tm) to me), this would probably be the most
reliable way of handling the problem.

Bill
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