lsb-release in edgy displays "No LSB modules are available."

[Paul Sladen]

'lsb_release' is in theory the future of telling what OS you're running. In Dapper, this displays:

  Distributor ID: Ubuntu
  Description: Ubuntu 6.06.1 LTS
  Release: 6.06
  Codename: dapper

On edgy, we now get:

  $ lsb_release
  No LSB modules are available.

'/etc/debian_version' contains:

  testing/unstable

'lsb_release' is doing a 'dpkg-query' is actually what's failing, I guess it's looking for the LSB modules. Doing 'apt-get install lsb' suggests:

  The following NEW packages will be installed
  alien lsb lsb-core lsb-cxx lsb-desktop lsb-graphics mailx ncurses-term pax postfix

[Sebastian Rode (sebastian-ro-deactivatedaccount)]

Confirmed on hardy

[Colin Watson (cjwatson)]

This behaviour seems correct to me. http://refspecs.freestandards.org/LSB_3.1.0/LSB-Core-generic/LSB-Core-generic/lsbrelease.html says "If no options are given, the -v option is assumed." -v requires the display of LSB modules, which in Debian/Ubuntu are implemented by the lsb-* metapackages. If you have none of those installed, then you'll get the output you quote.

However, if you simply say 'lsb_release -a', you'll get the information you asked for. This is in accordance with the specification for lsb_release.

Incidentally, I believe that you are mistaken about the behaviour in dapper:

(dapper)cjwatson@ronne:~$ lsb_release
No LSB modules are available.
(dapper)cjwatson@ronne:~$ lsb_release -a
No LSB modules are available.
Distributor ID: Ubuntu
Description: Ubuntu 6.06.2 LTS
Release: 6.06
Codename: dapper

[Tor Klingberg (tor-klingberg)]

It would be nice if something more informative was printed.

[Peanuts (peanutsmonkey)]

This bug also affects 12.04 LTS

[JS (js1943)]

@cjwatson lsb-* Ubuntu 24.04 server, are installed and still gives the error.

# lsb_release -a
No LSB modules are available.
Distributor ID: Ubuntu
Description: Ubuntu 24.04 LTS
Release: 24.04
Codename: noble

# dpkg -l|grep lsb
ii lsb-base 11.6 all transitional package for Linux Standard Base init script functionality
ii lsb-release 12.0-2 all Linux Standard Base version reporting utility (minimal implementation)