[HN Gopher] Owen Le Blanc: creator of the first Linux distribution
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Owen Le Blanc: creator of the first Linux distribution
Author : sohkamyung
Score : 135 points
Date : 2025-05-01 10:28 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (lwn.net)
(TXT) w3m dump (lwn.net)
| stuaxo wrote:
| The comments section on the article is nice, lots of people's
| memory's of MCC Interim Linux and Owen.
| noufalibrahim wrote:
| What a glorious piece of history. I wonder what other "scratching
| my itch" solutions became so mainstream that people forgot about
| the original authors.
| Foxboron wrote:
| I think all of todays popular Linux distros, Debian, Gentoo,
| Fedora, Arch, SUSE and so on, are all very much "scratching my
| itch" projects that somehow managed to outlive the original
| authors engagement with the project.
|
| It's not like any of them where planning to be used by millions
| of people.
| kryptiskt wrote:
| Fedora wasn't like that, it was spun out of Red Hat when they
| went enterprise only with RHEL.
| lproven wrote:
| Yes and no. I realise that to younger members of the Linux
| community they're all from long ago, but they're not the same
| age.
|
| There aren't really clear generations in Linux distros, but
| as an approximation:
|
| Debian is pretty old, but it's a 2nd gen distro, borne from
| dissatisfaction with the very early SLS.
|
| So was Slackware, but it took SLS and improved it. Slackware
| is arguably the oldest surviving distro.
|
| SuSE has roots as a German version of Slackware. Red Hat's
| package manager was bolted on later.
|
| Gentoo and Arch are relatively modern, being 21st century
| projects. Arguably, they're 3rd gen.
|
| Fedora is a 4th gen distro, younger than any of the others
| here. Its ancestor was Red Hat Linux, which was
| contemporaneous with Debian -- but was left behind by
| Debian's technical encancements: in 1996 or so, Debian
| introduced `apt`, a package manager with automatic recursive
| dependency resolution. This put it far in the lead of Red
| Hat, which still only had RPM and no dependency resolution.
|
| Red Hat went in another direction. Red Hat Linux 7 became
| RHEL, a commercial, paid-for, supported distro.
|
| The free RHL went on for 2 more versions, reaching Red Hat
| Linux 9, which then became Fedora Core, version 1 of the free
| unsupported community distro.
|
| RHL was killed off after v9.
| ghaff wrote:
| As I understood the story as an analyst at the time, Red
| Hat's intention was to just kill RHL after a decent
| interval but there was sufficient outcry that they came out
| with Fedora.
|
| But I'm sure there are many different recollections and
| variants of the Fedora was planned all along story told
| over the years that the "truth" is probably pretty elusive
| at this point.
| Foxboron wrote:
| > Debian is pretty old, but it's a 2nd gen distro, borne
| from dissatisfaction with the very early SLS.
|
| Scratches their own itch, check.
|
| > So was Slackware, but it took SLS and improved it.
| Slackware is arguably the oldest surviving distro.
|
| Itch scratching, check.
|
| >SuSE has roots as a German version of Slackware. Red Hat's
| package manager was bolted on later.
|
| Pretty sure this was itch scratching as well.
|
| > Gentoo and Arch are relatively modern, being 21st century
| projects. Arguably, they're 3rd gen.
|
| Both are itch scratching projects!
|
| > Fedora is a 4th gen distro, younger than any of the
| others here. Its ancestor was Red Hat Linux, which was
| contemporaneous with Debian -- but was left behind by
| Debian's technical encancements: in 1996 or so, Debian
| introduced `apt`, a package manager with automatic
| recursive dependency resolution. This put it far in the
| lead of Red Hat, which still only had RPM and no dependency
| resolution.
|
| Arch and Gentoo are from 2002, and Fedora from 2003.
|
| Fedora was based on someone starting to package FOSS
| software for RHEL, more itch scratching!
| qiine wrote:
| what about nixOS ? third gen as well ?
| daeken wrote:
| In this kind of hierarchy, I'd personally say fedora is
| third gen (due to it being so similar to Redhat) and that
| nixOS is fourth gen. Both came out around the same time,
| but took such vastly different routes with different
| kinds of itch scratching.
| lproven wrote:
| Yeah, that sounds about right.
|
| Gentoo and Arch are different takes on the same ways to
| build a distro.
|
| Gentoo took the FreeBSD ports tree model and applied it
| to Linux: still relatively conventional packages, but
| they're source and you compile the whole thing each time.
| Arch, still conventional packages, but no fixed release
| cycle.
|
| Nix throws all that, and the directory tree, out.
|
| Slackware: tarballs are good enough, they're all my dad
| and grandad ever needed.
|
| RHL: we'll have a package format, where packages can
| depend on others.
|
| Debian: we'll take the RH idea, but make a tool that can
| go fetch and install what's needed by what you asked for.
|
| Nix: you don't need to worry about stuff like packages or
| where stuff is. Tell us what you want and we will make it
| happen. (But you won't like the disk layout, so don't
| look.)
|
| Guix: we'll do Nix but with Scheme.
|
| AppImage: hey, you know Acorn did that apps-as-bundles
| thing first? And it's on Linux as ROX? What if we just
| zip up the bundles and mount them on demand?
|
| Flatpak: that sounds too hard, dude. But we all agree
| Git's cool, right? So, what if we could, like, distribute
| apps over Git?
|
| Gobo: all this packaging and dependency stuff is BS
| because you're still using a disk layout you improvised
| on the fly on some 1960s minicomputer with like 20 tiny
| little hard disks. Here, let's do a clean modern layout
| like NeXTstep did, but for the whole OS, then you don't
| really need a packaging tool any more. It's all just
| bundles, all the way down. But they're versioned. Just
| copy what you need.
|
| (Entire rest of Linux world) Waah! But mah FHS! If I
| don't have my FHS then I won't compile!
|
| Gobo: OK, OK, I'll fake it with symlinks for you, then
| hide it.
|
| Snap: hey, app bundles sounds good, but let's compress
| them into single files and mount them when needed. Bunch
| of symlinks and you'll hardly be able to see the joins.
| rconti wrote:
| > Red Hat went in another direction. Red Hat Linux 7 became
| RHEL, a commercial, paid-for, supported distro.
|
| This was the second time we had a Red Hat 7, though.
| fsiefken wrote:
| Some more context from a former colleague:
| https://techrights.org/n/2025/05/02/Manchester_Computing_Cen...
|
| MCC Interim Linux wikipedia page notes it started out with Linux
| kernel 0.12 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MCC_Interim_Linux
|
| https://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/Historic/old-version...
|
| It makes me want to play, configure, compile, tidy and optimize!
| https://github.com/ESP32DE/Boot-Linux-ESP32S3-Playground
| nikdoof wrote:
| Owen used to organise the Manchester Linux User Group at the MCC
| as well, I fondly remember those early days when I was learning
| Linux. Looking back it was an amazing privilege to connect with
| some extremely knowledgeable people in the Linux ecosystem.
| trebligdivad wrote:
| Yeh a few ManLUGers still get together for a Jitsi call about
| once a month; not many these days.
| mprstn wrote:
| I still remember Owen showing me Linux (I was a Ph.D. student in
| the graphics lab at MCC, so this was probably around 92-93). He's
| such a nice guy.
|
| I had no idea he had such a claim to fame....though I suspect he
| didn't either!
| TomMasz wrote:
| This really brings back memories of how painful installing _any_
| software in the early 90s was. The small company I worked for got
| us a Yggdrasil CD to try but we were unable to get it installed
| on any of the PCs we had at the time. MCC might have done better,
| but we hadn 't heard of it.
| TacticalCoder wrote:
| Was Yggdrasil that bad? My first distro was Slackware and, with
| the help of the book accompanying the CD, it was doable. Sure
| you had to define modelines for X11 (the Xorg name didn't exist
| bad then) to support your monitor and supporting GPUs was quite
| the endeavour, but in the end we'd make it work. We'd even
| compile and run Emacs (in 45 minutes or so).
| greenavocado wrote:
| It was called XFree86
| bluedino wrote:
| I don't remember what the first Linux distribution I used was,
| but it a set of floppy disks I downloaded from a local BBS.
|
| I somehow got it to boot up but didn't really know what to do
| with it after that.
| bityard wrote:
| Could very well have been Slackware. Slackware was my first
| Linux distribution, it came as a set of like at least 20
| floppies. All of mine were repurposed AOL disks. After
| spending about a solid week or so downloading the whole set
| of disk images over a slow and intermittent dialup
| connection, the next most painful thing was the fact that
| floppies were notoriously unreliable. Some disks would throw
| I/O errors when writing. Some would get caught immediately
| after when verifying. Many others showed no problems until
| install time. Getting two dozen floppies to actually read
| 100% of their contents successfully took a week or two on its
| own because I only had one computer to work with.
| rconti wrote:
| I very clearly remember my very first version of Slackware --
| pre 3.0.0 (which I actually bought on cd for a few bucks). I
| don't remember that first version, just that I downloaded the
| floppy disk sets over zmodem at 14.4kbps (thankfully saving to
| hard disk, not to floppy).
|
| That first version of Slackware I used had the Linux kernel
| 1.2.8; IIRC that series went to 1.2.13 before going through the
| a.out->ELF transition.
|
| Anyway, original point, that Slackware distro of 1.2.8 had a
| bug where every single time I had to reinstall the bootloader
| for a newly-compiled Linux kernel (which I had to do
| regularly), LILO was broken and hung at the `LI` prompt...
| those who were there may remember, the number of letters of
| LILO: that were output gave a sign to the source of the error.
|
| But every single time, I had to rescue boot, and try to
| remember what I had to fix to make LILO work again.
| lproven wrote:
| Previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43782975 (no
| comments)
| dnisbet wrote:
| Ooh great to see this pop up on the HN front page - I have great
| memories of working with Owen at UoM :)
| kpw94 wrote:
| So first linux distribution was this one Feb 1992.
|
| And first linux distribution with a GUI was "TAMU linux", 3
| months later: https://lwn.net/Articles/91371/
|
| Both were released by universities
| dehrmann wrote:
| Has the distribution model been good for Linux? It led to
| different approaches to things like desktop environments,
| packaging, and a variety of platforms, but 30+ years later, there
| are several sane choices for server distros, desktop distros are
| even more fragmented, and the most popular user distros are
| Android and ChromeOS.
| EGG_CREAM wrote:
| I think so, because the users seem to like having different
| options. For commercial software, it makes sense to count how
| many devices use a particular distribution as the measure of
| "success", but for projects like most Linux distributions , I
| don't know that number of users makes sense. Why should we care
| how many users a particular distribution has, when almost all
| of them aren't paying or contributing? Having more users
| doesn't make the software any better inherently, and nobody is
| making money from those users. Instead, I would argue that user
| enthusiasm and dev interest are better measures of success for
| open source projects like this, and arch, Debian, Linux mint,
| etc are all doing fine in those regards.
| michaelmrose wrote:
| It is tempting to consider the replacement for a lively
| evolving market of good options is just the best option only
| better for all the labor focused on a singular end but in fact
| the likely result of a singular option is most of that labor
| that literally only exists because of the interest in doing
| ones own thing just ceases to exists and is lost.
|
| What persists never had the privilege of benefiting from ideas
| taken from all those other now non-existent projects and is on
| the whole mediocre.
| kmacleod wrote:
| The packaging model of distribution is ubiquitous. _Every_
| distribution does the same thing just using different control
| files and tools. The differentiation between distributions is
| all in their packaging policies and platform decisions. In a
| loose way Unix (SysV, HP, AIX) started packaging before Linux
| but Linux said "Every project is its own package" and ran with
| it. The de-facto "Download release; apply patches; configure;
| make; make install; collect files" is present in every
| distribution package. Everything up through deployment is the
| same pattern across all distributions.
| NikkiA wrote:
| The amount of software available for linux vs the BSDs tells me
| that the distro model has not hurt linux. If a homogenous
| software stack from a single centralised set of software was
| beneficial, it would be more likely that porting to linux from
| a BSD codebase would be the norm, rather than the other way
| around.
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