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There are a number of problems with LSB that make it problematic for distros such as Debian. The forced usage of RPM being one. See the Wikipedia article for more on the matter.

If you search you'll possible come across a fairly dated looking page titled: Detecting Underlying Linux Distro from Novell. This is one of the few places I"ve seen an actual list that shows several of the major distros and how you can detect what underlying one you're using.

There are a number of problems with LSB that make it problematic for distros such as Debian. The forced usage of RPM being one. See the Wikipedia article for more on the matter.

If you search you'll possibly come across a fairly dated looking page titled: Detecting Underlying Linux Distro from Novell. This is one of the few places I"ve seen an actual list that shows several of the major distros and how you can detect what underlying one you're using.

UPDATE #1: Follow-up with SuSE

In speaking with @Nils in the comments below it was determined that for whatever reason, SLES11 appeared to drop LSB from being installed by default. It was only an optional installation, which seemed counter for a package that provides this type of key feature.

So I took the opportunity to contact someone from the OpenSuSE project to get a sense of why.

excerpt of email

Hi Rob,

I hope you don't mind me contacting you directly but I found your info here: 
https://en.opensuse.org/User:Rjschwei. I participate on one of the StackExchange 
sites, Unix & Linux and a question recently came up regarding the best option 
for determining the underlying OS.

http://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/92199/how-can-i-reliably-get-the-operating-systems-name/92218?noredirect=1#comment140840_92218

In my answer I suggested using lsb_release, but one of the other users mentioned 
that this command wasn't installed as part of SLES11 which kind of surprised me. 
Anyway we were looking for some way to confirm whether this was intentionally 
dropped from SLES or it was accidental.

Would you know how we could go about confirming this one way or another?

Thanks for reading this, appreciate any help and/or guidance on this.

-Sam Mingolelli
http://unix.stackexchange.com/users/7453/slm

Here's Rob's response

Hi,

On 10/01/2013 09:31 AM, Sam Mingo wrote:
- show quoted text -

lsb_release was not dropped in SLES 11. SLES 11 is LSB certified. However, it 
is not installed by default, which is consistent with pretty much every other
distribution. The lsb_release command is part of the lsb-release package.

At present almost every distribution has an entry in /etc such as 
/etc/SuSE-release for SLES and openSUSE. Since this is difficult for ISVs and 
others there is a standardization effort going on driven by the convergence to 
systemd. The standard location for distribution information in the future will 
be /etc/os-release, although Ubuntu will probably do something different.

HTH,    
Robert
    
--  Robert Schweikert                           MAY THE SOURCE BE WITH YOU    
SUSE-IBM Software Integration Center                   LINUX    
Tech Lead    
Public Cloud Architect 

#!/bin/sh
# Detects which OS and if it is Linux then it will detect which Linux Distribution.

OS=`uname -s`
REV=`uname -r`
MACH=`uname -m`

GetVersionFromFile()
{
    VERSION=`cat $1 | tr "\n" ' ' | sed s/.*VERSION.*=\ // `
}

if [ "${OS}" = "SunOS" ] ; then
    OS=Solaris
    ARCH=`uname -p` 
    OSSTR="${OS} ${REV}(${ARCH} `uname -v`)"
elif [ "${OS}" = "AIX" ] ; then
    OSSTR="${OS} `oslevel` (`oslevel -r`)"
elif [ "${OS}" = "Linux" ] ; then
    KERNEL=`uname -r`
    if [ -f /etc/redhat-release ] ; then
        DIST='RedHat'
        PSUEDONAME=`cat /etc/redhat-release | sed s/.*\(// | sed s/\)//`
        REV=`cat /etc/redhat-release | sed s/.*release\ // | sed s/\ .*//`
    elif [ -f /etc/SUSE-release ] ; then
        DIST=`cat /etc/SUSE-release | tr "\n" ' '| sed s/VERSION.*//`
        REV=`cat /etc/SUSE-release | tr "\n" ' ' | sed s/.*=\ //`
    elif [ -f /etc/mandrake-release ] ; then
        DIST='Mandrake'
        PSUEDONAME=`cat /etc/mandrake-release | sed s/.*\(// | sed s/\)//`
        REV=`cat /etc/mandrake-release | sed s/.*release\ // | sed s/\ .*//`
    elif [ -f /etc/debian_version ] ; then
        DIST="Debian `cat /etc/debian_version`"
        REV=""

    fi
    if [ -f /etc/UnitedLinux-release ] ; then
        DIST="${DIST}[`cat /etc/UnitedLinux-release | tr "\n" ' ' | sed s/VERSION.*//`]"
    fi
    
    OSSTR="${OS} ${DIST} ${REV}(${PSUEDONAME} ${KERNEL} ${MACH})"

fi
    
echo ${OSSTR}