Find the installation date of Linux on your PC

ID: 260

Category: Ubuntu

Added: 13th of April 2021

Updated On: Tutorial updated and rechecked on 24th of June 2025

Views: 2,982

On my main machine, I generally reinstall my Linux distribution every 6-7 months, so it's good to find out when I first installed it by looking in the syslog file

The syslog file can be found under the installer directory on Ubuntu and Ubuntu based distributions /var/log/installer

The syslog file can be viewed by entering the following command in the terminal

Since there is quite a lot of information, we can limit the number of lines output in the terminal by using the tail command followed by the -n (number).

This command below will output one line from the syslog file

Output from syslog file in the terminal, shows that I first installed my Linux Distribution on November 5th