Eugeny's

This little def will allow you to get short and unique IDs for different platforms and distros - from Windows to FreeBSD:

def detect_platform():
    if platform.system() != 'Linux':
        return platform.system().lower()

    dist = ''
    (maj, min, patch) = platform.python_version_tuple()
    if (maj * 10 + min) >= 26:
        dist = platform.linux_distribution()[0]
    else:
        dist = platform.dist()[0]

    if dist == '':
        try:
            dist = shell('strings -4 /etc/issue').split()[0]
        except:
            dist = 'unknown'

    return dist.strip()