A Short History of Linux Distributions
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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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| GuestArticles | Klemmer, Joe |
Posted Jul 1, 2004 4:36 UTC (Thu)
by sfllaw (subscriber, #7137)
[Link] (1 responses)
Posted Jul 1, 2004 22:09 UTC (Thu)
by raytd (guest, #4823)
[Link]
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. :)
Posted Jul 1, 2004 9:48 UTC (Thu)
by eru (subscriber, #2753)
[Link] (5 responses)
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!
Posted Jul 1, 2004 18:21 UTC (Thu)
by tjc (guest, #137)
[Link] (2 responses)
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.
Posted Jul 2, 2004 1:41 UTC (Fri)
by X-Nc (guest, #1661)
[Link] (1 responses)
Posted Jul 2, 2004 7:59 UTC (Fri)
by eru (subscriber, #2753)
[Link]
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.
Posted Jul 12, 2004 18:50 UTC (Mon)
by b12arr0 (guest, #22994)
[Link]
Posted Feb 2, 2007 21:03 UTC (Fri)
by bcshum0 (guest, #43114)
[Link]
Contact me at brantley.bighead_at_gmail_dot_com
Posted Jul 1, 2004 11:06 UTC (Thu)
by dps (guest, #5725)
[Link]
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).
Posted Jul 1, 2004 13:34 UTC (Thu)
by jlnance (guest, #4081)
[Link] (1 responses)
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.
Posted Jul 7, 2004 20:36 UTC (Wed)
by roelofs (guest, #2599)
[Link]
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
Posted Jul 1, 2004 20:38 UTC (Thu)
by jzbiciak (guest, #5246)
[Link] (1 responses)
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*
Posted Jul 5, 2004 16:25 UTC (Mon)
by jschrod (subscriber, #1646)
[Link]
Cheers, Joachim
Posted Jul 6, 2004 0:13 UTC (Tue)
by stock (guest, #5849)
[Link]
Posted Jul 8, 2004 12:10 UTC (Thu)
by leandro (guest, #1460)
[Link] (1 responses)
Posted Jul 18, 2013 8:28 UTC (Thu)
by lkundrak (subscriber, #43452)
[Link]
Posted Oct 25, 2014 15:01 UTC (Sat)
by briemers (guest, #73459)
[Link]
I also used to create SLS floppies and send them by e-mail, but I did not start doing that until Yggdrasil existed, mainly because I felt the price others were charging to send out linux discs was way to high, to get Linux in the hands of people doing it. Eventually though I stopped doing that, because I found creating so many floppies was ruining my hardware.
Bill
Posted Sep 22, 2021 1:28 UTC (Wed)
by jim02762 (guest, #154301)
[Link]
This is also incorrect. The boot/root floppies were made by Linus. Later on Jim Winstead took over responsibility for the root floppy. H.J. Lu's "bootable root" came a little later. It was announced Oct. 5th, 1992.
Slackware is only older than Debian by about a month, you know.
A Short History of Linux Distributions
A Short History of Linux Distributions
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:
Who was first...
Did Yggdrasil really precede SLS? I recall it was otherwise [snip]Who was first...
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.
Who was first...
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.
Infomagic and source CD:s
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. :)Who was first...
Russ
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. Who was first...
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.A Short History of Linux Distributions
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.A Short History of Linux Distributions
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.
A Short History of Linux Distributions
Wow, takes me back.A Short History of Linux Distributions
You remember it? well,
A Short History of Linux Distributions
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 :-)
A Short History of Linux Distributions
I archived a copy of SLS at :
ftp://ftp.crashrecovery.org/pub/linux/historic/SLS/
cheers
Robert
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.
Debian vs Red Hat
Debian vs Red Hat
Yggdrasil did not come before SLS
A Short History of Linux Distributions