Sometimes even the smallest task can be an issue if you are at the beginning of your Sysadmin career. More than that, in most of the cases if you ask the community you’ll not necessarily get an answer to be fully covered by your level of knowledge at that point in time. In the end, as I said, you can be at the beginning and you need more support than a simple command which is mostly used by the community.
Seeing this problem made me start a short series of Sysadmin articles as responses to many questions and/or situations saw I faced.
This time we’ll just answer the question: What linux distribution version is installed on this server? (The exact question I was asked was: How can I find the version of Linux installed on this server?)
On most of the forums usually you’ll probably get this answer:

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uname -a

A good one but not everyone is a techie so you’ll need to give them something that can be pronounced and is more comercial than the output of the above command.
For some Linux distros you can also use these commands (in conjunction with the above):

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# Debian based distros - i.e. Ubuntu
lsb_release -a
# Redhat based distros - i.e. Fedora, CentOs
cat /etc/redhat-release

This way you get the commercial name of your distro.
Enjoy!