[Discuss] Getting OS/HW details?

[kkeville at MIT.EDU (Kurt Keville)]

It is the rare install indeed that won't be well-described by the 
command line calls you have identified... on the remote chance you 
don't have an /etc/issue you should be able to grep dmesg for some 
keyword like "version" ... and if lspci doesn't tell you the exact 
motherboard you have, you can probably get enough info to Google 
with... but I'd be surprised if you have to go off-board for 1 out of 
100 arbitrary installs.

Still, it would be nice if there was a 1 stop shop, maybe a web page, 
where you could type in a kernel name and it would tell you the 
distro is most likely associated with. Take, for instance,

root at J1:~# uname -a
Linux J1 3.0.0-9-generic #14-Ubuntu SMP Tue Aug 23 17:02:50 UTC 2011 
i686    athlon i386 GNU/Linux

since it is Ubuntu and I have a date, I should be able to divine the 
distro... but 3.0.0-9-generic is unique to 11.10... and noone ever 
dowrevs a kernel, do they?

(seriously, do they? I've never seen it)