Owen Le Blanc: creator of the first Linux distribution

Ask a Linux enthusiast who created the Linux kernel, and odds are they will have no trouble naming Linus Torvalds—but many would be stumped if asked what the first Linux distribution was, and who created it. Some might guess Slackware, or its predecessor, Softlanding Linux System (SLS); both were arguably more influential but arrived just a bit later. The first honest-to-goodness distribution with a proper installer was MCC Interim Linux, created by Owen Le Blanc, released publicly in early 1992. I recently reached out to Le Blanc to learn more about his work on the distribution, what he has been doing since, and his thoughts on Linux in 2025.

When Torvalds first released the Linux kernel, he also provided "boot" and "root" disk images (intended for 5¼-inch floppy disks) to help users create a Linux system. There was not a proper installer, and users had to collect several other utilities to pull together a working system. This was not, even for the time, particularly user friendly. Clearly, Linux was going to need a little extra help on its path to world domination.

MCC Interim Linux

Le Blanc worked for the Manchester Computing Centre (MCC) at the University of Manchester from 1985 through 2016. He had been working with CDC 7600 and Cyber 170/730 machines, and eventually began working with HP 9000 workstations. Those ran Hewlett Packard's Unix, HP-UX, which made him want to learn more about Unix. He started with Xenix, but wanted something easier to use. He said that he also tried MINIX, but it was difficult to get working on a Intel 80486 CPU. When Torvalds announced Linux, Le Blanc decided to give it a try, and that too was a fair amount of work.

It was fairly hard to install Linux at first, because I think you needed both MS-DOS and Minix -- we used a bootloader from Minix before Werner Almesberger wrote LILO. You needed Minix because the DOS fdisk program could not write partitions for other operating systems, and you needed DOS if you wanted to do networking.

He was interested in improving the installation and created a Linux system that could be installed from a pair of floppy disks. He made use of ramdisk code by Ted Ts'o, took binaries from a proto-distribution created by H. J. Lu, and he wrote the original Linux fdisk "bugs and all" for the project. According to the MCC README for version 0.99.p10+, Le Blanc used his distribution to install Linux on 386-SX machines for the university's C and Unix courses. It was possible to install Linux on 12 machines in about an hour, according to the documentation, certainly an improvement over earlier installation methods. Eventually, he asked his department if he could share the work that he had been doing.

The department was reluctantly willing, provided (1) I gave them some credit for supporting its development, and (2) I made certain they had no responsibility for ongoing support for users. We agreed that calling it "MCC Interim Linux" suggested that MCC had developed it, and it was not intended to be a long term project.

The first MCC Interim Linux release (0.12) from February 1992, is, if not completely lost, certainly hard to find online. The 1.0 release is preserved on the ibiblio archive with other historic distributions such as Yggdrasil, Red Hat's "Mother's Day" 1.0 release, and SLS 1.03 and 1.05.

The distribution included things like GCC, GNU Awk, GNU Emacs, and the info packages because they were used in the university's courses. He did not attempt to include a wide assortment of other software, such as XFree86 (then X386), though.

Later releases can be found on debian.mcc.ac.uk, in the non-debian directory. It has several releases, up to the final 2.0 release from 1996. I had asked Le Blanc whether MCC had been distributed commercially, and he said no one had ever sold copies of MCC that he was aware of though "there were certainly people who passed disks to others". While doing some digging, though, I found that Walnut Creek had included MCC in some of its Linux Toolkit CD sets. For example, the Internet Archive has the March 1997 set with MCC Interim Linux 1.0+, along with Slackware, Debian, MkLinux, and others. Readers who have older Linux Toolkit CD sets, or similar sets, gathering dust in their closets may have even earlier versions.

In all, Le Blanc said that the project ran about seven years, with the last updates to the distribution being released in early 1998. During the time MCC was maintained, he said that he had received advice and suggestions from many people, including Torvalds, Ts'o, Almesberger, Alan Cox, as well as local users "especially John Heaton, Ted Harding and Nobby Clark".

The most valuable help was testing, which we tried to do before every release and update. In the early days I hoped I could find other people to develop add-ons to the system, but this never took off.

There is also some misinformation about MCC's development, he said, including claims that it was developed by Bruce Perens. "Bruce did terrific work on Debian and in many other ways, but he never had a connection with MCC Linux to my knowledge".

Le Blanc said that he used Debian from its early days, and eventually decided to encourage others to migrate to it as well. MCC Interim Linux included a migration tool for moving to Debian in its final release.

Supporting Linux

With other more ambitious and polished Linux distributions available, Le Blanc focused his attention on managing university servers and supporting Linux applications for MCC—later Information Technology Services (ITS)—users. All of the servers ran Debian, and he encouraged users to run Ubuntu—which he prefers for desktops as well. He also supported Scientific Linux for the computer science and mathematics department, but said that became harder and harder to sustain because it was "always a bit behind for those who wanted the latest versions of things". He also continued to promote Linux and said that he is still involved in open-source projects, such as LilyPond, today "but more as a user and support person than as a developer".

Despite being the home of the first Linux distribution, Le Blanc said, the University of Manchester was always a bit reluctant to use open-source software and he found himself "spending more and more energy to defend what we had". He said that there is still too much reluctance in universities, governments, and businesses to use free and open-source software or anything that doesn't come with a price tag. (LWN covered some of hurdles for open-source adoption in Mexican government in March.)

This despite the fact that much of the commercial support for "industry standard" software is pretty awful. Of course, when you have systems making use of open source/free software components, then you need local expertise to manage and support them, and this goes against the belief that it's safest to have systems for which you can easily buy support, because they use out-of-the box components put together according to the manual. Although this approach produces poorer quality systems that cost more in the long run to maintain and update, it's very hard to convince (non-technical) higher managers of this.

In 2016, Le Blanc accepted voluntary severance from ITS and moved on to teaching, where he is still active.

Linux would not have made it this far without Le Blanc—and others like him—making incremental contributions that paved the way for more people to use and improve Linux. MCC Interim Linux did not last long, but it was an important stepping stone on the path to longer-lived distributions like Debian.