Subj : Re: Solaris
To   : Lawrence Garvin
From : William McBrine
Date : Mon Oct 23 2000 05:24 am

-=> Lawrence Garvin wrote to William McBrine <=-

 LG> I have in my posession, sitting on top of my desk, right in front of
 LG> my face at this very instant in time, the First, Third and Fourth
 LG> editions of "Linux: Configuration and Installation" which was the
 LG> premier book form of Slackware distribution at the time.

If you judged the currency of a distribution by a book, you'd be making a grave 
error, as the books tend to lag quite a bit.

I said Slackware 3.0 was available in '96 because that's when I installed it on 
my own system. But as I now recall, the installation disc was dated Nov. '95. 
(And yes, I still have it.) It came as part of a package that included Red Hat 
2.1 and Debian 1.0. (Even these discs didn't necessarily reflect the most 
current distros available in Nov. '95.)

 LG> Notwithstanding that RedHat did not exist until sometime after
 LG> Slackware hit version 3.x... correct?

I can't find the exact release dates, though per the above, Slackware 3.0 and 
Red Hat 2.1 must have been roughly contemporary. Here are some excerpts from 
Red Hat's "History" page:

1995 Entrepreneurs Bob Young and Mark Ewing decide to use their
     marketing and technical expertise in a venture called Red Hat Linux.
1996 Red Hat Linux 4.0 is named desktop operating system of the year
     by InfoWorld. The honor is repeated the following year with Red Hat
     Linux 5.0.

From this, we can see that version 1.0 dates to '95, and they'd got as far as 
5.0 by '97. The next major release took a little longer:

April 1999 ... Red Hat unveils Red Hat Linux 6.0 ...

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