This has dual meaning, I was wondering what the first distros were? and also, what are some that are really "original" meaning, that they really really stand out from the crowd, one that I use that I consider to be original is demo linux, its slow and buggy but is ran from CD.
And this doesnt have anyhting to do with that, but can I dual boot two distros on the same machine?(not counting demo linux)

the oldest surviving distro now is slackware...

and you can dual boot with more than one linux distro.. i have had 3 before... at one time on one hard drive..

I agree i think its Slackware, the other ones eventually died out somehow.

yeah, slackware is based off of one of the first ever distros back in late '91 and early '92. So yes, out of the distro's today that are still being used and developed, Slackware is the oldest.

The first distro I ever used was Yggdrasil and to my amazement their site is still up. I did move the Slackware after that.

http://www.yggdrasil.com/

--jeremy

Dual booting Linux distros is rather easy, although I haven't ever bothered on how to find out how to do it properly... If there is such a thing with Linux. Lilo will boot just about anything from anywhere. Right now I'm penta-booting Win98, Slackware 8, RedHat7.2, FreeBSD4.4 and LFS. The easiest way is to just install the new distro on whatever extra partition or drive without a boot loader, copy its kernel (vmlinuz or bzImage) to the /boot directory of whatever distro is running lilo. Edit your lilo.conf file, and then re-run lilo. Its fun! whee!

Cheers,

Finegan

Wow, i'd never want to have more than triple os's i mean even having two operating systems is kindof annoying becuase i have to switch between the two when you want to develop (windows for that).

But i guess if you just wanna have fun, and have the disk space (i dont) then it can be cool.

I'm now down to quad-booting. Mandrake 8.1, Slack 8.0, Debian something, Windows ME. When I have the time to clear out my harddisk of all the crap that litters it, I am going to try XP. The main reason for doing this is so that I'm up-to-date and can help/fix XP machines.

You should keep XP, when i moved from windows 2000 to XP it was no diffferent in performance feeling etc becuase its still based on the trusty NT kernel.

Since your moving from ME there will be some things you need to get used to. Also so many people complain about the bubble look of windows xp but you can so easily switch to the "classic" theme and it looks just like 9x/2000.

That's funny... keeping up to date so I could help people was why I installed RedHat.

Cheers,

Finegan

Your missing the point, i think he needs it to help people having problems with Windows machines.

Your not alone, thats part of the reason i keep XP is so i can work.

I wasn't missing the point, I was making light of the point. A dead catfish could tell you Thymox was going to install XP to keep updated on the newest bugpile coming out of Redmond so he could be the nice guy he is and help out his pals as well as just keeping abreast of the world's leading desktop OS.

I just installed RedHat so that I could help answer the greater than 80% of posts on this forum that don't involve Slackware. I keep reading about problems with a mountain of RH utilities I never use, so I also figured that it was time to help out my buddies and keep abreast of the world's leading desktop OS (that doesn't suck). Basically I just donated a 2.8Gb beaten up old Maxtor to Linuxquestions. It keeps me from posting guesses and ill formed opinions.

Cheers,

Finegan

ok sorry i thought you meant helping people with windows problems...ok.

Original distro? well, I've recently "converted" to Debian, and I'm already a fanatic he he...

Debian started in 1993 and since then they're the one and only named "GNU/Linux", they also have been sponsored directly from the Free Software Foundation...

In that sense original means historically closer to the development of Stallman's free sofware philosophy than any other OS.

el_felipe

Speaking of 'original', and tying a link in with GNU & FSF, what has become of HURD?