On Thu, Nov 06, 2003 at 10:35:42AM +0530, psawant@nse.co.in wrote:
communication protocol). the initial welcome/login screen shows the following msg: Red Hat Linux release 7.2 (Enigma) ^^^ Kernel 2.4.7-10 on an i686
This is generated from /etc/issue.net, which in turn is generated from /etc/redhat-release.
but the contents of "/proc/version" are: Linux version 2.4.7-10 (<some email id>) (gcc version 2.96 20000731) (Red Hat Linux 7.1 2.96-98) #<today's date>
Are you sure this is exactly the kind of output you get? /proc/version seems to contain information about the actual kernel you are running ... probably information about the machine on which it was built. In my case, it shows:
Linux version 2.4.20.db08 (root@trantor5) (gcc version 3.3.1 20030626 (Debian prerelease)) #1 Wed Aug 6 20:10:23 IST 2003
The kernel version says its a 2.4.20 kernel, and "db08" is an additional tag that I attached when building it, which means its a deb, created in August using the standard Debian packaging tools.
"root@trantor5" probably tells who built the kernel. But I am damn sure I didn't build it as root, but just as a normal user, so I don't know why it says root!
You'll notice that the "Debian prerelease" is actually _inside_ the the parentheses that enclose the gcc version. I am not really sure how to interpret this, but I think it just tells which distribution the compiler is from.
The "#1" probably means that this was the first kernel built from the source tree, or something like that.
The date is not _today's_ date, but the build date.
does the file "/proc/version" change (or is updated) at every reboot (or some other convinient time interval). i.e. if i change the entry in "/proc/version" to make it RHL 7.2, will it stay like that forever (or until someone changes it), or will it get rectified at the next reboot? also where does the display shown at login time come from?
/proc is not a real directory on your hard-disk. The files under /proc exist only inside the running kernel, and are used get information and also send control messages to stuff happening inside the kernel.
Sameer.