How to find out EXACTLY what distro a system is runing?

FatRakoon · 9 Dec 2016 at 02:43

Might be obvious to some, but Im playing with a PC that I myself knocked up and I cannot for the life of me work out what distro its running?

Ok, its Debian based, Ubuntu derivative and thats crystal clear as its using Ubuntu repos and other than that, I am kind of stuck.

Its absolutely not vital of course, but it would be nice to know WTF I used to install it...Was it Mint, or Ubuntu or any other flavour of them... Any normal person would know because they choce a distro and thats that, but Im a bell end who has a copy of every single distro that exists and I have them all on seperate flash drives cos I am a flange! and so I really dont have a clue what I am up to half the time. lol

Frozennova · 9 Dec 2016 at 07:15

From the command line run

cat /etc/issue.net

memyselfandi · 9 Dec 2016 at 09:19

Look for .release files in /etc/ .... issue.net can be edited and may not show anything meaningful.

joeyjojo · 9 Dec 2016 at 10:04

This has several tricks including /etc/issue as above

https://www.cyberciti.biz/faq/find-linux-distribution-name-version-number/

Here's a list of distros based on Ubuntu (59 of them).

https://distrowatch.com/search.php?basedon=Ubuntu

SMN · 9 Dec 2016 at 14:24

"lsb_release -a", no?

pete910 · 9 Dec 2016 at 15:16

cat /etc/release

thelonecrouton · 12 Dec 2016 at 10:57

FatRakoon said:
I really dont have a clue what I am up to half the time. lol

If you know what you're doing 50% of the time, you have most of us beat.

SMN said:
"lsb_release -a", no?

Works for me!