Slackware 2.3 discovered
 

LOL I've just discovered a slackware 2.3 directory on an old SuSE CD set from 1995. I didn't know what it was at the time. If only I had known I wouldn't have bothered with SuSE. :D

It contains the historic kernel source of linux 0.01 which is a whooping 72 kB archive. :D

IIRC SuSE was originally Slackware translated to German.
SuSE's first own released version was 4.2 ~1996 prior to 4.2/1996 SuSE was a translated version of Slackware.

I see. truth be told I didn't look at SuSE until a few years later. I got the 1995 CDs because they contained copies of various university ftp servers. It was the only way to get the sources. In those days we dialled up to a BBS at 1200, later 19200 bits per second. There was no such thing as cheap internet for private people. :)

Hi,

Back in those days I had a T1 available to me. Great at the time. My personal access was moved to cable, major differences. Cable was a lot better than dial-up but still slow compared to T1. So I would download at the LAB and sneaker things home. I still have boxes of floppies stored. At the time one of the ways to transport. Box sets were available at a fair cost but the lag due to shipping was a pain. I finally budgeted for a burner that made things much better. Now I have loads of stored CD, probably some are junk. :(

Look at Linux Distro Timeline, a good visual presentation that is not up to date. GNU/Linux Distribution Timeline 11.4 is current as of 04-05-2011.

Those were the days. :)

Those are pretty cool, but the placement of Debian on the timelines is wishful history on their part (and they are not the only ones, really... welcome to How History Works 101). Can anyone come up with a real date when Debian was available from a public FTP site? I would be curious about that. A manifesto does not a distro make. And, if we're going by when things were available to the public, Slackware should be pushed back to March or April of 1993, and (I think) Debian should be somewhere in late 1994.

Is there a lineage link to some other distribution missing there? :D

Hi,

Pat, I really do not think Linux Distro Timeline, is that precise. Scale is rather broad but does give a general time line. It does seem that Contributors did not verify.

Debian propaganda shows released in August 1993. But if memory serves then I too think that Debian was released much later. Distrowatch shows 1996/06/17 for 1.1 publicaly.

But:
So foundation was founded on August 16th, 1993, unsure of release date.

GNU/Linux Distribution Timeline 11.4 seems to do a better job

For the historians. There certainly indication that Debian did have something going during 1994.
http://lists.debian.org/debian-annou.../msg00004.html
"Debian GNU/Linux 0.93 will be released on September 25, 1995, the
Debian Project announced today. This release will be the sixth of
version 0.93, which has been under development for over a year. It
represents the first official release from the Debian Project since
January 1994. Release 5 of version 0.93, an unofficial BETA release,
has been available to the public since March 1995, and has received
rave reviews from its users."
The mailing list go back to Feb 1994. There is an indication that there was a version 0.91 certainly out by Feb 1994, and maybe a 0.92 being worked on.

However, this article also mentions that something was available to download since the time of Oct 1st 1994.
http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/2841
This article is also interesting to mention its slackware influence, since dpkg was supposed to be able to use slackware packages.


Here is a 0.91 changelog
http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/historic-...0.91/ChangeLog
"15 Sep 93: Debian Linux 0.01 ALPHA released (pre-ALPHA)"
So that is definitely the genesis, but 26 Jan 94, version 0.90 is considered the public beta.

This helps fill in the gaps of what was going on.
http://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/pr...leases.en.html

So development started in the summer of 1993. 0.91 was probably the first real release (Jan 94), and 0.93 Beta in ~mid 1995 (with 6 patch releases?) was popular for a while. There was no real version 1.0 (accidentally released before it was ready), so version 1.1 on June 17th, 1996 was the big one, and it's clear it is the next version after 0.93 because it is mentioned in the upgrade instructions.

Interesting. I spotted something called MCC which is also contained on the aforementioned CD set. The table makes it look like the mother of all distros...

Edit: I've discovered the article http://lwn.net/Articles/91371/ which explains MCC, TAMU and the genesis of linux distributions. :)

Here's a copy of of SLS for downloading...

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

you can find more on http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/historic-...distributions/ ;P

Very interesting! Thanks for the link, I'd like to collect a couple of those...

And the coincidence is that I found a couple of weeks ago, among a pile of old CDs, my old Slackware 4.0 cd. Now I have it up and running in VirtualBox! :cool: