My Linux Notebook

How to find which Ubuntu Linux version you are running.

When you are running multiple Ubuntu machine servers or desktops with different versions, you need to be able to tell which Ubuntu Linux version each machine is running.

There are two ways to find out what the Ubuntu Linux version is.

Getting the Ubuntu Linux Version from /etc/issue

The Ubuntu Linux version is written in the /etc/issue file. By invoking the cat command we can print the file content on the screen. Lets find out what is the version of the Ubuntu Linux I am using now.

$ cat /etc/issue
Ubuntu 8.10 \n \l

We can see that this machine is running Ubuntu 8.10

Getting Ubuntu Linux Version from /etc/lsb-release

The /etc/lsb-release file holds the Ubuntu version number and the version code name. Once again using the cat command we can print the file content with the version number and the version code name. Lets run the command on the same machine that we ran the cat /etc/issue command.

$ cat /etc/lsb-release
DISTRIB_ID=Ubuntu
DISTRIB_RELEASE=8.10
DISTRIB_CODENAME=intrepid
DISTRIB_DESCRIPTION="Ubuntu 8.10"

We can see again that the Ubuntu version is 8.10 but now we know that the Ubuntu 8.10 code name is intrepid.

Lets find the version of two other machines which run different versions of Ubuntu Linux.
machine 1:
$ cat /etc/lsb-release
DISTRIB_ID=Ubuntu
DISTRIB_RELEASE=8.04
DISTRIB_CODENAME=hardy
DISTRIB_DESCRIPTION="Ubuntu 8.04.1"

machine 2:
cat /etc/lsb-release
DISTRIB_ID=Ubuntu
DISTRIB_RELEASE=7.10
DISTRIB_CODENAME=gutsy
DISTRIB_DESCRIPTION="Ubuntu 7.10"
The first machine is running Ubuntu version 8.04.1 code name hardy. The second machine is running Ubuntu version 7.10 code name gutsy.

Getting Ubuntu Linux Version using the lsb_release command

Using the lsb_release command we can get only the description part from the /etc/lsb-release.

$ lsb_release -d
Description: Ubuntu 9.04