I was looking at how to tell the version of Redhat Linux installed on a machine from a command line. Mostly I used uname -a to view the server settings.
Here is a sample:
$ uname -a
Linux myserver.mydomain.com 2.6.18-8.el5 #1 SMP Fri Jan 26 14:15:21 EST 2007 i686 i686 i386 GNU/Linux
It return the server kernel’s version: 2.6.18-8.el5 #1, but not something my mother could understand.
To get a layman term, we can query file /etc/redhat-release instead.
$ cat /etc/redhat-release
Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server release 5 (Tikanga)
fzcool
NetWidZ..! 