[conspire] Distro thread

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Texx (texxgadget at gmail.com):

> [The SUSE people] claim to have started in 1992, making them actually
> older than RedHat, but couldnt tell me when they were first available
> shrink wrapped.

The _firm_ ('Gesellschaft für Software und System Entwicklung mbH') was
established in 1992 -- and what they distributed at that time was
Slackware (and also SLS).  Then in 1994, Patrick Volkerding helped
translate Slackware into German, and the resulting translated Slackware
was sold as 'S.u.S.E. Linux 1.0' -- but there was at that point no other
software difference from Slackware, except full German language support.

The company played around a bit with slightly customised Slackware, then 
switched stategies between 1993 and 1996 to use Florian La Roche's Jurix, 
another now-defunct early Linux distribution out of Germany, about which see
http://linux.mathematik.tu-darmstadt.de/pub/linux/distributions/jurix/docs/history.html .
The firm hired La Roche, in effect taking Jurix in-house, and it was he
who developed the YaST admin tool for which SUSE became best known.
Finally, the next release, 'S.u.S.E Linux 4.2' (to my knowledge the
first non-beta after 1.0) followed, and was the first released that was
distinctive from other people's work.  The new version number was, of
course, a Hitchhiker's Guide reference.

So, whoever told you they 'started in 1992' was either underinformed or
was cheating a bit, because before 1996 SUSE was just a Unix consultancy
firm and redistributor of other people's distributions.

> I was surprised that the latest acquisition of Suse (Pronounced ' soo
> sah ' , NOT ' soo see' )



> They were owned by Novell, then Micro Focus, and now some Swedish
> venture capitalist firm....

Yeah, I said that.