The Linux Operating System can be found in a lot of places. While it might not be as easy to use as Windows or macOS, it has its own set of advantages that make its use widespread. It is found in the Web servers you interact with, in your smartphone, and maybe, even in the entertainment unit of your car. One of the reasons for this versatility is that Linux is an open-source Operating System with many different flavors. It is also very lightweight and can run on very low resources. It can be considered modular in nature and can be customized as per requirements, meaning that only those components can be installed which are required. All of these reasons make Linux an important part of our lives.
Linux comes in many different flavors, also called distributions. There are minor differences between these distributions. Sometimes the differences are mostly cosmetic, while sometimes the differences are a little more pronounced. Some of the common Linux distributions include:
To find the OS release information, we can use the cat utility to read the file located at /etc/os-release.To know more about the cat utility, you can read its man page.
man cat
The /etc/passwd file contains information about the user accounts that exist on a Linux system. We can use the cat utility to read this file. The output contains 7 colon-separated fields, describing username, password information, user id (uid), group id (gid), description, home directory information, and the default shell that executes when the user logs in. It can be noticed that just like Windows, the user-created user accounts have uids 1000 or above. You can use the following command to make it more readable:
cat /etc/passwd| column -t -s :
In the above command, we can see the information for the user ubuntu. The username is ubuntu, its password information field shows x, which signifies that the password information is stored in the /etc/shadow file. The uid of the user is 1000. The gid is also 1000. The description, which often contains the full name or contact information, mentions the name Ubuntu. The home directory is set to /home/ubuntu, and the default shell is set to /bin/bash. We can see similar information about other users from the file as well.