How to Find Your Raspberry Pi OS (Raspbian) Version

May 30, 2021

1 minute

When you've got so many Raspberry Pi's laying around, it's easy to forget which version of Raspberry Pi OS (formerly Raspbian) you're running. In this guide, I'll show you how to find which version of Raspberry Pi OS is running on your Raspberry Pi.

Note: If you're not using Raspberry Pi OS, visit this guide to check your Linux version (and distribution).

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To begin, let's open a shell on your Raspberry Pi. You do this via SSH or using Terminal from your Raspberry Pi Desktop.

If you've got a shell open on your Pi, you can run the following:

cat /etc/os-release

This will print relevant operating system details, including the version and name of the release.

 
PRETTY_NAME="Raspbian GNU/Linux 10 (buster)"
NAME="Raspbian GNU/Linux"
VERSION_ID="10"
VERSION="10 (buster)"
VERSION_CODENAME=buster
ID=raspbian
ID_LIKE=debian
HOME_URL="http://www.raspbian.org/"
SUPPORT_URL="http://www.raspbian.org/RaspbianForums"
BUG_REPORT_URL="http://www.raspbian.org/RaspbianBugs"

There are a few pieces of relevant information here. We can see the Raspbian/Debian version id "10" plus the codename "buster".