LWN: Comments on "A Short History of Linux Distributions"

Who was first...

bcshum0 — 2007-02-02T21:03:58+00:00

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

Who was first...

b12arr0 — 2004-07-12T18:50:31+00:00

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

Debian vs Red Hat

leandro — 2004-07-08T12:10:43+00:00

What I would like to see confirmed was an old story about Red Hat creating RPM because they couldnt (or wouldnt) wait (or collaborate) to complete dpkg.

A Short History of Linux Distributions

roelofs — 2004-07-07T20:36:07+00:00

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

stock — 2004-07-06T00:13:19+00:00

I archived a copy of SLS at :

ftp://ftp.crashrecovery.org/pub/linux/historic/SLS/

cheers

Robert

A Short History of Linux Distributions

jschrod — 2004-07-05T16:25:45+00:00

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

Infomagic and source CD:s

eru — 2004-07-02T07:59:58+00:00

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...

X-Nc — 2004-07-02T01:41:25+00:00

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.

A Short History of Linux Distributions

raytd — 2004-07-01T22:09:33+00:00

Well... I guess you can take comfort in the fact that the stable release of Debian is waaaaay older the stable release of Slackware.

Sorry. That was uncalled for. I shall submit myself to the nearest Debian advocate for flogging. :)

A Short History of Linux Distributions

jzbiciak — 2004-07-01T20:38:07+00:00

Wow, takes me back.

I remember having a hybrid SLS 1.0.3 / Slackware 1.1.1 system at one point. I also remember the a.out/ELF switchover.

I had a 386sx33 back then, with a whopping 4MB of RAM. I did run X eventually, but with little more than xterms open. All the real work was on one of the Sun machines elsewhere on campus.

Later I went to a 486DX33 with 16MB of RAM, and Slackware 3-ish. I snagged the RAM for the low, low price of $475. *cough*

Who was first...

tjc — 2004-07-01T18:21:12+00:00

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.

A Short History of Linux Distributions

jlnance — 2004-07-01T13:34:47+00:00

I am not sure exactly what happened to SLS. I believe its author put a lot of work into making kernel modules work. This was back before Linus'es kernel had modules. His work was not well received, and I think he might have packed up his bags and moved on.

But for a time SLS was Linux. It was all anyone ran.

A Short History of Linux Distributions

dps — 2004-07-01T11:06:05+00:00

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).

Who was first...

eru — 2004-07-01T09:48:31+00:00

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!

A Short History of Linux Distributions

sfllaw — 2004-07-01T04:36:06+00:00

Slackware is only older than Debian by about a month, you know.