First off, props to you for thinking out of the box and learning Linux. It’s good to know more than just Microsoft Windows and MacOS X for our modern world, and 10x if you’re involved in any sort of Web development or even run a Web site. While Windows and Mac might be on people’s desktops, it’s really a Linux world behind the scenes. In fact, there are estimates that a staggering 96% of the Web servers powering the top 1000 Web sites are running Linux. Impressive!
Since you’re running Ubuntu Linux you have a very nice and smartly designed user interface (called a “GUI” [graphical user interface] “WM” [window manager] in Linux parlance) which gives you a point and click option, but more generally whether you’re on a Linux, Unix or other ‘nix system, you can always count on the uname command.
Let’s have a closer look. First, the easy way; on Ubuntu click on the gear icon on the very top right:
As you can see, the top option is About This Computer (just like a Mac, eh?) so click to choose that. A window will pop up with all the information you desire:
As you can see, this particular system is running Ubuntu 16.04 LTS. LTS? Long Term Support, it’s a category of Ubuntu releases and is very stable. There’s more information but that’s the basic.
Now, open up an xterm and try both uname -v to just get the OS version and uname -a to get as much infomration about the system as it can report:
You can see that the command line yields a bit more detail: It’s not 16.04, it’s actually 16.04.1 that is running on this particular machine.
Armed with the uname command, let’s try it on a another computer, a Mac system from its own command line:
In this case, you can see that it’s running Darwin kernel version 17.5.0. Quite different from the MacOS X release number 10.13.4. Darwin, if you’re curious, is the Unix/Linux system upon which MacOS X is built and it’s darn powerful in its own right…
More importantly, now you can explore various Linux systems with the uname -a command and see that version numbers are all over the map!
Pro Tip: While we’re talking about Linux, why not check out our Linux help pages too?
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