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Jurix started in 1993 and is thus one of the oldest Linux distributions. It started with three floppy disks and it didn't take much time until I needed five of them.
At that time the Linux community wasn't too big and many source packages still needed lots of changes (and hacks) to work on Linux. Many source packages were distributed with a special Linux version of them as the original authors didn't use Linux yet.
From the very beginning, I separated the Linux changes from the unmodified source packages and tried my best to improve many source packages and special Linux changes. /usr/bin/pkgpack was my very first shell script and it helped me collecting the necessary changes to the original unmodified source code.
The NetKits are another result of my separation of the unmodified sources from the necessary Linux changes. I have also spend some more work on the shadow sources (as jurix used them right from the beginning) and on the dialog program.
In 1994 I installed the server www.jura.uni-sb.de with my Linux distro and also several client machines, so that any student could choose between Windows and Linux to browse the Internet or write Email. The client machines used bootp for their network settings and had about 70 MB of locally installed software. Just enough for X11 and the necessary client tools.
Around 1995 or 1996 Yggdrasil had jurix together with some other distros on one of their CD-ROMs. They never emailed me about that nor have I seen actually one of those CD-ROMs, so I don't know how stable that snapshot was. :-)
LST 1.0 was also based on jurix. They even used the binaries from a jurix mirror, but repackaged some other things like man-pages.
Since october 1995 I am paid by SuSE. Until then they used to sell a modified Slackware. Jurix was used as a fresh start and I have done most of the work for the first release of SuSE 4.2 in april 1996. The 4.x series of SuSE were closely coupled with jurix and many people liked the stability and design of the basic system. SuSE has added lots of new packages to make the CD-ROMS more complete and spend some time to add good documentation. YaST helps novice users and also more experienced ones a lot.
I have started my own update tool at the end of 1996. It has until now only the few things that I need myself for updating my server machines and compiling the source packages in a chroot-envionment. If someone would support further development, I am sure this could result in a very powerful and flexibel tool. Per default, the binary packages are still in .tgz format, but I also wouldn't mind if someone comes up with a working tgz->rpm converter and offers jurix with the Red Hat install disks and rpm packages.
| Copyright (C) 1999 by Florian La Roche |
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