A bit of kernel information

Good evening. Sorry I missed my normal post of yesterday but, just didn't have time with family and such. Tonight will actually be fairly short as well, but I promise I've got something in the works soon so hopefully that will make up for the few lacking posts recently.

Today, I want to share with you something that I learned. I want to share with you the [uname] and it's output in Linux.

It's main purpose is to tell you about the system you're on. It gives you handy information but it might not always look handy when reading it.

A few key elements to know and note. [uname] simply puts what kind of system you are on. If you're on Solaris, I believe it outputs "SunOS". If you are on Ubuntu, I know it outputs "Linux"

Pretty simple right? Let's see if we can't get it to do a few more things for us.

Let's try a [uname -a], I've heard of this one being used.

Well that looks more like it! That's so much information! IN fact... Let's probably say that is too MUCH information. Let's try reading through some of this and then maybe filtering it back.

We are gonna start from left to right.... Linux. Check. Ubuntu. Check. All of this is making sense so far. 3.8.0-31-generic. Uh. Check? I know it's referring to kernel but not much else. {insert garbage between #46-...2013}. Don't know what that ALL means but I've got a decent idea. It's at least got the date and time in there. So then i686. Well it's not 64-bit. It's telling us that it's based on the x86 architecture so. It's 32-bit. And the athlon part means it's AMD. Again, i686. Then it ends with GNU/Linux. Check. Pretty standard. Once you walk through each part at least.

Well let's focus on the kernel message. Let's take a closer look at what it outputs. I give it the old [uname -r] input. I get this:

Ok so. Let's start from left to right. Linux has a format for their kernel naming/numbering scheme. It goes in this format.

major.minor(stable/beta).revision-no_clue-generic

So the way to remember this is. I'm running version "blah". In my case, I'm running kernel 3. Most people include the minor in that though so, I would be running kernel 3.8... But! I found out a little tidbit this evening. Linux does a cool thing with their numbers on the minor. If it's a stable version, it's an even number. If it's an odd number, you're using an unstable, test, or aka BETA version. How cool is that?! They think of everything... Anyways. Then the revision. Minor updates for that happen and get appended on there. That number probably changes quite often. BUT! Now you should be able to look at at least SOME output from [uname] and read it. I thought that was some interesting stuff on the output for [uname] and I hope you did too. Good luck guys!

-Mitch