Over the years, Iron Man has had a lot of suits. The suit he had when he started out looks nothing like the suit he wore in the Civil War movie. Linux® kernels are something like that, the first kernels don’t look anything like the kernels of today. There are different kernel versions that depend on what the person who put it together wanted and what hardware you’re running.
In other words, the kernel version of your Linux® system probably doesn’t look anything like the kernel version of the system I’m running. But you can’t tell just by looking at the system what kernel version you’re running, so it’s not like Iron Man’s suit. It would be neat if it was, imagine if your system put on a new suit every time you put a new kernel on it. I think it would be awesome for it to change color at least every time I put on a new kernel, but it doesn’t work like that.
Luckily, there’s a command to find out what kernel version you’re running and it’s called uname. The man page for it
uname man page
Tells you exactly what it’s designed for, it’s to print system information.
So, what information do I want? I want the kernel version!
That’s:
Alpha:~ computerlamp$ uname -v #1 SMP Tue Aug 12 09:58:26 UTC 2014
What else can I find out?
Well, I can find out what machine name I’m running, that’s uname -m
I can find out the name of my computer, that’s uname -b. I can also find out the name of my computer using a different command. That one is
Alpha:~ computerlamp$ hostname Alpha
Alpha:~ computerlamp$ uname -b Alpha
Either way I run the command, I get the same result out, which means as usual there’s more than one way to do it!
I can also find out my processor, or my hardware platform, or the operating system.
But wait, you say, of course I know my operating system, I’m using Linux®. Well, it’s always good to double check that using our friendly comman.
Alpha:~ computerlamp$ uname -o GNU/Linux
If you have multiple systems, it’s always useful to find out what kernel version you’re running on each one. It’s a good idea to keep it consistent, but that’s up to the administrator.