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Given a machine that may or may not have been through a number of release upgrades, how can I find out the version of Ubuntu that was originally installed? Assuming that logging configuration has not been changed from default.

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You mean "release upgrade"? because dist-upgrade is not what take from an ubuntu release to the next. – enzotib Jul 24 '11 at 5:55
Yes, that's what I meant, sorry. – Mykro Jul 27 '11 at 1:29

2 Answers

up vote 5 down vote accepted

If you have not done manual modifications, you should see the utilised installation media on the top of /etc/apt/sources.list:

# deb cdrom:[Kubuntu 10.04 LTS _Lucid Lynx_ - Release i386 (20100427)]/ lucid main restricted
# See http://help.ubuntu.com/community/UpgradeNotes for how to upgrade to
# newer versions of the distribution.

Apport (the Ubuntu bug reporter) uses /var/log/installer/media-info to determine the installation media which contains:

Kubuntu 10.04 LTS "Lucid Lynx" - Release i386 (20100427)

This only works if you kept the /var/log/installer folder.

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Both of the suggestions (/etc/apt/sources.list and /var/log/installer/media-info) worked - they indicated on a 11.04 machine that 10.10 was the original installation. Thank you! – Mykro Jul 27 '11 at 1:41
up vote 2 down vote

You can go to see older dpkg.log file available on the system, and take the older package reported on that:

less $(ls -rt /var/log/dpkg.log* | 
  head -1) | 
  awk 'NF == 6 && $3 == "install" { print $4, $6; exit }'

then go to http://packages.ubuntu.com/ and see to what release of ubuntu it belongs.

But this is not errors free, because older dpkg logs can be removed, depending on logrotate policy.

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Thanks for this suggestion. It's a little tricky because Ubuntu automatically zips up older log files, but I was able to unzip them and retrieve the original install package: "base-files 5.0.0ubuntu23". I got tied up finding the right place at packages.ubuntu.com to query this. But I can see this answer would be a handy option when other alternatives fail. – Mykro Jul 27 '11 at 1:38
The command I gave take care of gzipped files too. – enzotib Jul 27 '11 at 6:24

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