Can I reliably use the value os.version to determine the Linux distro?

I'm parsing customer logs, I need to want to figure out wh开发者_开发知识库ich distro they are running. I can't run commands on their systems, all I have is the logs.

The property os.name always returns, Linux, but the os.version returns what appears to be the kernel version? For instance, 2.6.9-42.0.3.ELsmp or 2.6.5-7.283-smp.

After some google is appears that the last characters of the os.version can be mapped to a distro.

Values ending in, ELsmp or el, map to Redhat, just plain smp maps to SUSE.

Is that true or I'm just engaging in wishfully thinking?

That's true as long as they use distro-specific kernels - vanilla kernels with distro-specific patches applied. But they might also use entirely different or custom kernels, maybe even a vanilla kernel. And I'm not sure what will happen if it is a virtual machine. Those kernels might end in -xen or -openvz or something similar. Different distros may also use the same kernel, so that makes it even harder again.

If the distro vendor applies their own patches to the kernel, they usually add a tag to the version number to indicate that it's a custom version of the kernel. If they just use the stock kernel as written by Linus and friends, then there often won't be a tag.

The tag may even be different between distros by the same vendor, that would otherwise be compatible. Or it may be the same for different distros. (Last i saw, Fedora kernels didn't have the "EL" or "el" tags. CentOS kernels, however, have the same tags as RHEL.) Or, for some distros, it may not be there at all.

You'll get info for the major distributions, true. But it won't be possible to guess it for 100% of your logs.

FYI: search generic or generic-pae for Ubuntu, but you'll miss some other. Debian don't have specific endings apart from -686 and -amd64, but it must be the case for many other distributions.