OT: How to match a substring?

[Kent West <westk@acu.edu>]

This oughtta be simple for your scripters out there . . .

I need to run a test in a .bashrc startup script to see whether the 
machine the user is logging onto is a Solaris or a Linux box (the /home 
directory is shared between the two, and paths need to be modified 
according to which OS is being logged into).

Something like this:

if {the first word of "uname -a" is Linux}
then echo "You're logging into Linux"
else
echo "You're logging into something else, probably Solaris"
fi

My problem is that I don't know how to match for the first word of 
"uname -a". I've tried things like:

if [ `uname -a`:0:5} = "Linux" ]

and

if {awk '{ print $1 }' < `uname -a` = "Linux" ]

and etc, but I can't seem to get this figured out.

Any help would be appreciated.

Thanks!

--
Kent