Mayank Sharma cant help you find your purpose in life, but he sure can help find a distribution for your purpose.
Linux, the kernel, by itself wouldn’t be of much use to most of us. Version 0.01 of the Linux kernel made its debut in September 1991, but it only made sense to a particular Finnish student and his ilk of uber-geek hackers.
One of them, Owen Le Blanc of the Manchester Computing Centre (MCC), wrote a menu-driven installer to install the kernel along with a handful of GNU utilities, and in the process created the first Linux distribution in February 1992. This distribution allowed even non-Unix users to get a taste of Linux and helped roll in more developers.
Later that year Peter MacDonald created the Softlanding Linux System (SLS) distribution that offered a software collection on top of the X11 graphical interface, which had only recently been ported to Linux. SLS in turn spawned two major distributions. The first was Slackware created by Patrick Volkerding in July 1993. Over two decades later it remains the oldest Linux distribution that’s still actively maintained. The other was Ian Murdoch’s Debian. Although it had been in development for several months, v0.91 released in January 1994 was its first public release and included a simple package system that could install and uninstall packages. The next major milestone in the Linux distribution timeline also happened in 1994 with the birth of Marc Ewing’s Red Hat Linux.
Together these three distributions form the bedrock of the modern Linux distribution habitat. Although there have been other independent distributions such as Crux, Arch, Gentoo and Puppy, a majority of the current stock is an offshoot of the three oldest distributions. You’ll find hundreds of them on distrowatch, all vying for a slice of your hard disk. Over the next few pages we’ll help you sort through the lot and pick the one that’ll serve you best.
Name your poison
What do you want to get out of a modern Linux distro?
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Esta historia es de la edición October 2018 de Linux Format.
Comience su prueba gratuita de Magzter GOLD de 7 días para acceder a miles de historias premium seleccionadas y a más de 9,000 revistas y periódicos.
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Create your first WebSocket service
Mihalis Tsoukalos explains how to use the Go programming language to work with the WebSocket protocol.
Fantastic Mr Firefox
Nick Peers takes a trip down memory lane to reveal the story behind the rise - and slight fall - of Mozilla's popular web browser.
Set up your terminal and email like it's 1983
Jump in the hot terminal time machine with Mats Tage Axelsson who emails from the command line using the latest technology.
Universal layer text effects with GIMP
Posters use them, films and presentations are hard to imagine without them: text effects. Attract attention with Karsten Günther and GIMP.
Jump to a federated social network
Nick Peers reveals how you can get up and running with this free, decentralised and non-profit alternative to Twitter.
Free our SOFTWARE!
Taking anything for granted is dangerous, so Jonni Bidwell and Mike Saunders revisit how the free software movement got started to help free us from proprietary tyranny!
Master RPI.GPIO
Les Pounder goes back to the early days of the Raspberry Pi - and his career with this classic library! -
Waveshare Zero to Pi3
Transform your Pi Zero into a Pi 3, they promised Les Pounder, but it's more like adding on go-faster stripes.
The Best OPEN SOURCE Software Ever!
In an attempt to trigger controversy, Michael Reed and Neil Mohr unequivocally state these are the greatest free software apps ever. Probably. We’re just trying to be helpful.
Linux-Mandrake 7
Simplicity and a wide range of applications make this a great distribution for all Linux users.
