On Fri, 18 Jun 2004, David Lang wrote:
by the way there's useually a *version file in /etc that tells you whatIt's usually possible to figure out the distribution and version by
version of a particular distro you are running on (or at least what it was
before it got tweaked)
looking at /etc/issue. However it's impossible to figure out who has made
the kernel image. It's possible to identify Mandrake kernels and few
others. However in general all kernel versions look the same.
The current situation is that every company who like to ship open source
drivers with their hardware will have to automatically detect large
amount of kernel and distribution combinations and try to decide which
kind of installation approach is needed. After everything is settled then
some distribution changes it's interfaces and the circus begins once
again. Finally when a change is made to the installation procedure then
how to test if it still works with all 100 or 200 different systems and
kernel images that have already been tested during past years.
I think many persons reading this list don't realize that a significant
number of Linux installations are still using 7.x or even 6.x versions of
whatever distribution they had originally installed in the system.
Companies doing Linux software (be it open source or closed source) need
to support them in addition to the state of the art distributions. So
would it be too much to ask that kernels based on the same major version
do certain things in the same way.