How to decipher Linux release info
There’s a lot more to identifying a Linux release than citing a simple version number. Even a quick look at the output from the uname command can tell you that. What is all of that information, and what does it tell you?
In this post, we’ll take a closer look at the output from the uname command along with release descriptions provided by some other commands and files.
Using uname
A lot of information is displayed whenever you issue the command uname -a in a Linux system terminal window. That's because that little “a” tells the man command that you want to see all of the output that the command is able to provide. The resultant display will tell you a lot of different things about the system. In fact, each chunk of information displayed tells you something different about the system.