Unfortunately, as has been mentioned, there's no way to know with any certainty just how to identify what distribution you're on. Just where would uname get the information, when we can't agree on where to find it by hand?
It's certainly not the kernel's job to know what distribution it came with. You could put the burdon on the distribution creator by adding some feature to uname, and then hoping that the various distributions would buy into the change and comply with whatever means you used to identify the distribution and version... But I wouldn't count on it. The various distributions can't even agree on a filename format that would lend itself to easy use. SuSE supplies a command "SPident" which returns the "found" and "expected" versions of the distribution, though I've never been able to get it to respond with what I expected. The system I'm looking at right now "expects" SLES-9-s390x-SP4, but "finds" SLES-9-s390x-SP1 + "online updates". On one of my SLES 10 images, I get SLE-10-s390x-SP1 + "online updates", so the output doesn't conform from release to release either. We went from "SLES" to "SLE". The SPident command is notably absent from my RedHat systems. So in summary, there seems to be no simple way, either manual or automated, of knowing what distribution you're on, without prior knowledge of what distribution you're on. -- Robert P. Nix Mayo Foundation .~. RO-OE-5-55 200 First Street SW /V\ 507-284-0844 Rochester, MN 55905 /( )\ ----- ^^-^^ "In theory, theory and practice are the same, but in practice, theory and practice are different." On 8/20/08 2:01 AM, "Mark Perry" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > Thought.... > wouldn't it be nice if another option were added to the uname command > that listed Distributor info? > > It could at a minimum do the functional equivalent of "cat > /etc/distro-info" and each distributor could set a softlink to their own > existing files, or patches could be applied to uname to supply the info > "inline". > > Then customers could do something like uname -V or uname -D and have a > consistent method of obtaining distributor information. > > mark ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For LINUX-390 subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message: INFO LINUX-390 or visit http://www.marist.edu/htbin/wlvindex?LINUX-390
