A Short History of Linux Distributions [LWN.net]

June 30, 2004

This article was contributed by Joe Klemmer

There have been many articles and books written about Linux; where it came from, how it got where it is today, the whole "Who's Who" list... A good Google search or some time spent on sites such as The Linux Documentation Project and Linux Journal will tell you more than you could ever wish to know. But there is little information on the history and evolution of Linux distributions. As of this writing, there are 303 Linux distributions according to DistroWatch [editor's note: currently 353 "active" distributions are listed on LWN's Distribution List]. It would seem that everyone and his dog has a distribution available. This hasn't always been the case.

Back in late 1991, when Linux first hit the 'Net, there were no distributions per se. The closest thing was HJ Lu's Boot/Root floppies. They were 5.25" diskettes that could be used to get a Linux system running. You booted from the boot disk and then, when prompted, inserted the root disk. After a while you got a command prompt. Back in those days if you wanted to boot from your hard drive you had to use a hex editor on the master boot record of your disk. Something that was definitely not for the faint of heart. I remember when Erik Ratcliffe wrote the first instructions (this was long before HOWTO files) on how to do just that. It wasn't until later that anything you could call a real distribution appeared.

The first such thing was from the Manchester Computing Centre. Known as MCC Interim Linux, it was a collection of diskettes that, once installed on your system, let you have a basic UNIX environment. It was console only, no X. Shortly after that there was a release out of Texas A&M University called TAMU 1.0A. This was the first one that let you run X, though the method they used to configure it occasionally allowed the magic smoke to escape from your monitor. Both of these were developed for their universities' in-house use. They were also released to the world for anyone to use.

The first commercial, in the sense that it was developed for public consumption rather than in-house use only, Linux distribution was Yggdrasil. This also had the distinction of being the first "Live" Linux CD. You could boot from a diskette and run everything off the CD. This was back in days of 1x and 2x CD-ROM drive speeds so it wasn't exactly setting the world on fire. You could start X then literally go get a cup of coffee before it finished coming up. Yggdrasil had some nice features dealing with configuration, though, especially for the time.

On the heels of that came the first widely recognized and used Linux distribution, SLS Linux. It was put together by Soft Landing Systems, hence the name, and came in a handful of files that you would unzip and copy to floppy disks. This was Linux's first big breakthrough. SLS dominated the market until the developers made a decision to change the executable format (if you remember the a.out to ELF conversion you'll remember this). This was not well received by the user base. Just around the time this happened Patrick Volkerding had taken SLS and adapted, modified, tweaked and cleaned it up making it a different thing all together. He called it Slackware. With the unpopular direction SLS had taken, Slackware quickly replaced it and became the dominant distribution used by nearly everyone. In fact it's still in use today.

Now, all of this took place in the span of about 3 years. In those days the speed with which changes happened was unbelievable. By the time '94/'95 came around you started seeing more distributions popping up. Familiar names like Red Hat, Debian, Caldera, TurboLinux, and SuSE were becoming popular. There were also a few other distributions that came and went between '91 and '95. However, they had little impact on the overall direction that Linux distributions would take. If you search the 'Net you can still find references to these early distributions, and possibly even some archives of the releases themselves. If you have some free time you should look at these old releases. Not only will you be able to see how far Linux has come, you'll also see what life was like in the early days of Linux distributions.

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Who was first...

Posted Jul 1, 2004 9:48 UTC (Thu) by eru (subscriber, #2753) [Link]

Did Yggdrasil really precede SLS? I recall it was otherwise (I have used both), and a bit of googling in comp.os.linux archives confirms it:

In the newsgroup, Yggdrasil's alpha version was announced on 1992-11-24

SLS is mentioned on a 1992-08-12 posting where its author is looking for a friendly FTP admin for hosting the distribution, and also tells how to order floppies.

The Yggdrasil distribution went to heroic lenghts to ensure the CD was accessible. At that time there were lots of incompatible CD rom interfaces in addition to SCSI, which was more expensive. I think the IDE CD interface was not yet standardized in 1992. As a last resort, the later Yggdrasils even included a hack for running any proprietary MS-DOS CD-ROM driver from inside Linux!

Who was first...

Posted Jul 1, 2004 18:21 UTC (Thu) by tjc (subscriber, #137) [Link]

Did Yggdrasil really precede SLS? I recall it was otherwise [snip]

I recall something from the same time period called "Infomagic" (I think), but I'm not sure where this fits in. I threw the discs out a long time ago.

I never could get any of these to work with my Diamond video card (Diamond withheld the necessary specs), and it wasn't until Slackware came along that I was able to get X working.

Who was first...

Posted Jul 2, 2004 1:41 UTC (Fri) by X-Nc (guest, #1661) [Link]

Infomagic was one of the first, if not the first, companies to sell Linux CD's. They packaged up a few CDs worth of files and also some small amount of printed material. Though I can't remember his name, I met the founder of Infomagic at Open Systems/FedUNIX in '93 (or was it '94?). This was maybe a year before he passed away.

Infomagic and source CD:s

Posted Jul 2, 2004 7:59 UTC (Fri) by eru (subscriber, #2753) [Link]

That is also what I remember. I don't think Infomagic ever made a distribution of its own, but they published CD:s with other peoples Linux distributions on them.

I still have an Infomagic source CD from 1993. It's contents is very much like one would find on a public university FTP server in those days: various X11, GNU and BSD sources.

By the way, for everyone with early CD:s like this: don't throw them away. They might became important sources if you ever need to find prior art for software patents. A CD like this is a publication with a known issue date and provenance.

Who was first...

Posted Jul 12, 2004 18:50 UTC (Mon) by b12arr0 (guest, #22994) [Link]

I remember SLS was before Yggdrasil as well. I remember running SLS and hearing of Yggdrasil being a CD based distro. My only thought was I'm glad I don't run that because then I'd have to pronounce it. :)

Russ

Who was first...

Posted Feb 2, 2007 21:03 UTC (Fri) by bcshum0 (guest, #43114) [Link]

I'm looking for the user that goes by the name of ERU. I'm replying to a very old post you made in 2004. You mentioned in your post that you have a Linux CD from 1993, and you also mentioned that people should hang onto such CD's for prior art purposes. I would love to get in touch with you concerning obtaining a copy of your CD for prior art purposes. Or if you happen to know people who have other old linux CDs lying around, I'd love to hear about it.

Contact me at brantley.bighead_at_gmail_dot_com

A Short History of Linux Distributions

Posted Jul 1, 2004 11:06 UTC (Thu) by dps (subscriber, #5725) [Link]

Yes, I was there with a "high spec" 486DX2/50 with 8Mb of memory. It was known you bought a box of 20 floppies and used the spare one as an extrta boot disc... somehow I am not sure today's multiple CD dsistributions represent progress in all respects.

When I did it there where some instany ungrades, like kernel 0.99pl15h. gcc was 2.x and compiling a shared library invovled an email address. Now I am imagining a x64_64 3200+ box with 1GB of memory and it is *much* more affordable (although I am saving money but *not* including a CD, DVD, operating system, display, keyboard, etc (all deemed "vital" in high-end non-custom boxen).

A Short History of Linux Distributions

Posted Jul 7, 2004 20:36 UTC (Wed) by roelofs (guest, #2599) [Link]

I am not sure it was executable formats that pushed people from SLS to Slackware. I seem to remember that Slackware evolved because Patrick couldn't get SLS to incorporate the changes he had made to their distro. So he started his own.

That's my recollection, too. (Of course, we could just ask him...) In fact, I remember doing the a.out-to-ELF to transition (painfully), based in part on a file called move_to_elf and dated 19950520 (but not signed--can't remember if it was Pat's or someone like HJ's or tytso's). That was already in the Slackware 3.x days, I'm pretty sure.

FWIW, I still have a console-only Linux distro running on a 16 MHz Toshiba 2200SX (386SuX, remember?) with 4MB RAM and something like 24MB of a 40MB hard drive (with 4MB for swap and 12MB for an existing Win3.x partition, IIRC). It's still occasionally useful for taking notes, although the NiCads died long ago. I've also got a 75 MHz Pentium-based WinBook running Linux, X, and even Netscape 3.x in 16MB. Can't say I use either one very often, though.

Finally, I just found an old floppy labelled with a Post-It: "MCC BOOT DISK (Linux "nocdboot")". There's an unlabelled floppy next to it that might be the root disk...maybe I'll give it a try one of these days.

Greg

A Short History of Linux Distributions

Posted Jul 5, 2004 16:25 UTC (Mon) by jschrod (subscriber, #1646) [Link]

You remember it? well,

puma:bin $ pwd
/usr/local/bin
puma:bin $ file unshar xx*code
unshar:   Linux/i386 demand-paged executable (ZMAGIC), stripped
xxdecode: Linux/i386 demand-paged executable (ZMAGIC), stripped
xxencode: Linux/i386 demand-paged executable (ZMAGIC), stripped
puma:bin $ date
Mon Jul  5 18:23:31 CEST 2004

I still run some of them. Why should I recompile when they Just Work(tm)? Not that I need xxdecode any more, Bitnet is gone... :-) I still run SunOS binaries on my Solaris systems, as well :-)

Cheers, Joachim