Determining installed version of Ubuntu

Neither uname nor motd are of much use in determining the version of Ubuntu installed on a third-party system, and searching launchpad.net for version details of key packages in dpkg is annoying.

Fortunately there is a utility called lsb_release that provides this information:


bash$ lsb_release -si
Ubuntu
bash$ lsb_release -sr
11.04
bash$ lsb_release -sc
natty

Complete all the way down to the silly nickname for each release.

Since this is an LSB utility, it's probably been in place for some time, silently waiting to provide more detail than uname. Seriously, would a mention in the SEE ALSO section of the uname manpage be *so* hard to add?