Linux Milestones
Many battles were fought-and coffee urns emptied-to get distros to where they are today. Here’s a quick recap
LINUX DISTRIBUTIONS have come a long way since the good old days. In the beginning, of course, there were no distros (actually in the beginning there was no Linux, and no space-time, then there was a big bang- but you get the point). You’d start with the kernel, somehow bootstrap a barebones system, fetch some GNU tools, mess with the make files, compile those packages, install them, realize you’d got your Make file wrong, tidy up the mess. Rinse, lather, repeat. It was great fun.
More often than not you had to get these things on CD or even floppy disk in the post, unless you had access to the internet (or a friend in a computer science department). Then in 1992 came SLS, which inspired Slackware and later frustrated Ian Murdock into creating Debian. Yggdrasil, the first Linux live CD, was launched shortly after SLS, which required a gluttonous 8MB of memory and a gargantuan 100MB of disk space. The first stable version of Debian didn’t appear until 1996, by which time Red Hat Linux was on the scene, and all of a sudden people realized there was money to be made with Linux.