Re: Internal make command Macro to identify linux/os distribution.

[Paul Smith]

On Tue, 2008-09-09 at 16:18 +0530, Gautam Shejwalkar wrote:
> Yes, I was referring to the distro. Actually based on the distro I
> want to decide which rpm package needs to be installed. B'coz only in
> uname -r we get the information on the distro. I am not sure if there
> are any other commands available for checking the distro type.

uname -r returns the version of the kernel.  _Some_ distros will build
custom kernels and _some_ of them will put a reference to the distro
name in the kernel name.  But, this is very, very far from being a
reliable test.  People can rebuild their kernels for lots of reasons.
Also some distros DON'T put a distro reference in the kernel name (on my
Ubuntu 8.04 system for example, uname -r gives "2.6.24-21-generic").

The best, most portable way to tell the distro name on a Linux system is
with lsb_release; any LSB-compliant distro will have this command.  You
can see the options for details, but probably you want "lsb_release
--id" if all you want is the distribution vendor ("Red Hat" etc.) or
"lsb_release --description" if you want the distro version info.

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