Finding Solaris release and kernel info

Published 19 Apr 2001 Read time 50 sec(s) (2389 views). Solaris

Occasionaly, you need to determine what release of Solaris OE are you running and other useful information that comes with that, like architecture, installation date, etc.

Using the following:

use uname -a (short for unix name) is a command-line utility under Solaris (an other Unix-like systems) that prints the name, version and other details about the current machine and the operating system running on it.
```
$ uname -a
SunOS smurf 5.8 Generic sun4u sparc SUNW,Ultra-5_10
```

To see the hardware update that you have installed, review the /etc/release file:

$ cat /etc/release
             Solaris 8 2/04 s28s_hw4wos_05a SPARC
 Copyright 2004 Sun Microsystems, Inc.  All Rights Reserved.
                  Assembled 26 February 2000

Use showrev (easy to see hostid, architecture, kernel version):

$ showrev -a
Hostname: smurf
Hostid: 1a2b3c4d
Release: 5.8
Kernel architecture: sun4u
Application architecture: sparc
Hardware provider: Sun_Microsystems
Domain: lab
Kernel version: SunOS 5.8 s28_26 February 2000

OpenWindows version: 
OpenWindows Version 3.6.2  9 August 1999

No patches are installed

The following example shows sample output from the hostid command:
```
$ hostid
1a2b3c4d
```