Hat tip to Beyond Caffeine, whose owner gave me the original kick in the memory to this clever little line command:

cat /etc/lsb-release

Which returns:

DISTRIB_ID=Ubuntu
DISTRIB_RELEASE=8.04
DISTRIB_CODENAME=hardy
DISTRIB_DESCRIPTION="Ubuntu 8.04.2"

While most users could simply go to the menus in the window manager (in GNOME: System » About Ubuntu ) to achieve more or less the same result, this is handy for people who need to remote in/SSH to an Ubuntu machine, or have the server based installation of Ubuntu.

And yes, I probably should do a dist-upgrade to Jaunty Jackalope.. but I’m kinda lazy about that sort of thing, especially when my current version (Hardy Heron) is a LTS (Long Term Support).