Identifying Your Linux Distribution

Not sure which Linux distribution you’re running? Open a terminal and type:

cat /etc/issue

On Debian 4.0, for example, this outputs:

Debian GNU/Linux 4.0 \n \l

The \n and \l are escape sequences for the hostname and terminal device – they’re not part of the distribution name.

This works on most distributions. Some also have /etc/os-release with more detail:

cat /etc/os-release