Who was first... [LWN.net]

Who was first...

Posted Jul 1, 2004 18:21 UTC (Thu) by tjc (subscriber, #137)
In reply to: Who was first... by eru
Parent article: A Short History of Linux Distributions

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.

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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.