Linux Administration Cookbook

uname

When you've logged in successfully, determine what sort of kernel you're running:

$ unameLinux

Well that was anti-climactic... it's just a regular Linux system.

But what if it wasn't? Imagine the following:

$ unameFreeBSD

That's more like it! This is a FreeBSD box!

Or is it a different BSD?

$ unameOpenBSD

An OpenBSD box, cool! But we can go one further:

$ unameSunOS

Huh? What's a SunOS when it's at home?

The short answer is that you can assume you've landed on either an Oracle Solaris or illumos distribution, both of which are relatively rare, but deserve a degree of respect.