The Daemon, the GNU and the Penguin, by Dr. Peter H. Salus

This installment of The Daemon, the GNU and the Penguin looks at some of the early Linux distributions. "The first of these was Adam Richter's Yggdrasil (in the Old Norse Edda, Yggdrasil is the "world ash," from a branch of which Odin/Wotan made his spear). Yggdrasil alpha was released on 8 December 1992. It was called LGX: Linux/GNU/X -- the three components of the system. Recall that Gilmore, Tiemann and Henkel-Wallace formed Cygnus in 1989. Richter spoke to Michael Tiemann about setting up a business, but was "definitely uninterested in joining forces with Cygnus." Yggdrasil beta was released the next year."

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The Daemon, the GNU and the Penguin, by Dr. Peter H. Salus - Ch. 20 (Groklaw)

Posted Nov 1, 2005 23:42 UTC (Tue) by JoeBuck (subscriber, #2330) [Link] (6 responses)

Unfortunately, this chapter is not up to the standard of Dr. Salus's earlier work. Not only are some of the facts wrong, but the organization is sloppy and the writing is disjointed. First we're told that Yggdrasil was first, then we're told that SLS was earlier. We're told that Adam Richter wanted to work with Cygnus, and also that he did not.

It appears that MCC Interim Linux deserves the title of first distro, as the ancestor of SLS, which is in turn the ancestor of Slackware.

The Daemon, the GNU and the Penguin, by Dr. Peter H. Salus - Ch. 20 (Groklaw)

Posted Nov 2, 2005 6:46 UTC (Wed) by evgeny (subscriber, #774) [Link] (2 responses)

> First we're told that Yggdrasil was first, then we're told that SLS was earlier.

Well you've got confused by a somewhat inaccurate LWN excerpt of the article. The original refers to the first distribution that comes on CDROM, which is probably correct. I remember my first Linux installation, it was SLS on ~15 or so 5.25" floppies which needed to be ftp'ed. And then the last one, as luck would have it, appeared to have bad sectors, the installation aborted, so I had to repeat everything from the beginning...

The Daemon, the GNU and the Penguin, by Dr. Peter H. Salus - Ch. 20 (Groklaw)

Posted Nov 2, 2005 15:00 UTC (Wed) by Ross (guest, #4065) [Link] (1 responses)

I haven't re-checked, but when I read it my impression is that it was saying the standard mode of distribution at that time was CD-ROMs. I'm also puzzled over the SLS/Slackware thing and the absence of any Debian discussion. Or discussion about packaging, which was a huge change in the way distrubutions worked.

MCC Interim Preceded SLS, Yggdrasil was first on CD

Posted Nov 3, 2005 0:15 UTC (Thu) by AnswerGuy (guest, #1256) [Link]

I was there, reading alt.os.linux just before the comp.os.linux.* USENET netnews hierarchy was created. I lurked for the first several months and only started posting later (from my old jadestar@netcom.com account and also from my old address at the Peter Norton Group (which was already part of Symantec by then, but still retained some brand identity for several years).

As I recall MCC Interim was developed before the term "distribution" was
coined; and it was more of a "kit" than what would call a "distribution"
today. It was a bit like "Linux From Scratch" in some ways. I never used it.

I downloaded my SLS diskette images and painstakingly used rawrite on all 20 or so of them. Yes, one of mine had bad sectors, too. It was the first thing I heard referred to as a "distro" as it was applied to Linux. (Obviously BSD uses the term --- Berkeley Software Distribution; but the connotations are a bit different than the Linux terminology).

Yggdrasil was the first distribution that was shipped on CD-ROM. The first version I had was something like 0.11 running something like a 0.97 kernel; and it shipped with an 8x10" booklet (actually 11x17, folded and saddle stapled). It was a whopping 50 pages or so of documentation.

Whoa! That all makes me feel OLD.

JimD

Poor series

Posted Nov 2, 2005 10:16 UTC (Wed) by man_ls (guest, #15091) [Link] (2 responses)

I would say it is up to par: it has not been a very good series from the beginning.

Poor series

Posted Nov 6, 2005 7:37 UTC (Sun) by pimlott (guest, #1535) [Link] (1 responses)

I have to agree. A really good history of free software has not yet been written, so far as I know.

Poor series

Posted Nov 11, 2005 5:43 UTC (Fri) by roelofs (guest, #2599) [Link]

Indeed. Salus has some good anecdotes, and I expect I can trust about 90% of what he wrote about the early days, but the quality throughout has been relatively low. I can only hope this online serial version is just his first draft and that the eventual, final copy will be significantly edited and upgraded. (I'm less than impressed by five-paragraph "chapters," too.)

Greg

The Daemon, the GNU and the Penguin, by Dr. Peter H. Salus - Ch. 20 (Groklaw)

Posted Nov 2, 2005 13:11 UTC (Wed) by brugolsky (guest, #28) [Link]

I still have all of the Yggdrasil CDs; I've been meaning to find a few minutes to get them running under QEMU. KNOPPIX is deservedly lauded, but Adam was first with a LiveCD. I still recall the use of /lib/compressed/* to do transparent file decompression. It even included a rudimentary audio and video playback. :-)