| July 3, 1991 | some device drivers, and the hard drive are now working; some basic user-level features are now being considered |
| August 25, 1991 | v0.01 is almost ready; MMU used for paging (not to disk yet) and segmentation, pseudo ttys, BSD sockets, user-mode filesystem, window size in the tty structure, systems calls are capable of supporting POSIX.1 and BSD-style filenames |
| September 1991 | Linux v0.01: no binaries are available yet, only source code; a small filesystem exists, along with a working disk-driver |
| October 5, 1991 | Linux v0.02: The first "official" version of Linux was announced. This version was able to run bash, gcc, gnu-make, gnu-sed, and compress. This version was not very usable. |
| October 26, 1991 | Linux v0.03: This version of Linux was considered usable. |
| November, 1991 | Linux v0.10 |
| December 19, 1991 | Linux v0.11: This was the first stand-alone version of Linux. There was still no SCSI support, although there were people working on it. Hardware setup for this version consisted of ISA+AT-disk. No init/login yet either, you would get bash as root upon bootup (standard in the next release as well). Partially working VM (paging to disk), but 4M was needed to be able to run the GNU binaries, especially gcc. Bootup was possible with only 2M, but you could not compile. |
| December (Xmas) 1991 | Linux v0.11+VM: Several people were trying to compile the kernel with 2M and failing, hence this version was made available to this small group of individuals that wanted to test it out. |
| January 5, 1992 | Linux v0.12: This was the first version of Linux to contain "non-essential" features. This was also the first version that Linus allowed any money to change hands due to Linux. Previously Linux had been distributed free, under a very lenient copyright owned by Linus. This previous copyright had actually been much more restrictive than the GNU copyright. |
| March 1992 | Linux v0.95 |
| April 1992 | Linux v0.96: This version of Linux was capable of running X-Windows |
| August 7, 1992 | I (Jonathan Magid) take over Linux archives from Alan Clegg and move them to sunsite.unc.edu. They had been at banjo.mcnc.org. The load on the machine was too great (according to his boss) as it was transfering 37 megabytes/day of Linux and 386BSD stuff per day. |
| September 15, 1992 | Alan Clegg submits a proposal for file system standardization on behalf of the Linux-Standards list. |
| October 18, 1992 | Linux v0.98.2: This version contained a new FPU-emulator by
Bill Metzenthen. Bigger than the old one by Linus, but instead of only
doing a few of the most important instructions, it emulates the whole 387
instruction set. It was also much faster than the old emulator + the soft
math library. The new emulator made a separate soft-float library
unnecessary, which simplified GCC distribution a bit.
Minor memory management fixes: One of the minor fixes, the trapping of kernel NULL dereferences, proved to break a lot code. This proved to be very good, since many kernel or driver bugs showed up. Unfortunately, v0.98.pl2 was not usable on many computers, since the kernel bugs creep up too often. SCSI driver changes by Eric Youngdale. Mostly bug-fixes. Some TCP/IP patches. TCP/IP was still alpha, and had not been extensively tested, and hence was not up to real use yet. Psaux mouse patches by Dean Troyer. Starting with this version, Linus will no longer made bootdisks. This task was turned over to H.J. Lu and Jim Winstead. |
| October 19, 1992 | Peter Williams announced a debugged version of ed, the Unix line editor, courtesy of Bill Metzenthen. ed was used mostly by patch and shell scripts. In the early days of Unix ed was used as the primary editor. |
| October 20, 1992 | Peter MacDonald announced an update to SLS. It contained man pages
that were accidentally removed in a previous release.
David Black announced Pirates BBS v1.9 for Linux. It was a multiuser bulletin board system. Working kernel TCP/IP was required, and 10M of disk space was recommended. Olaf Erb announced Wampes with Linux support. The announcement didn't describe what it was. Thomas Dunbar announced a port of GNU's free-standing info file reader. This package allowed you to read the GNU on-line documentation, instead of doing it from within GNU Emacs. Also included were makeinfo and texindex, used for formatting info files from texinfo source code. |
| October 21, 1992 | Mark Becker, the author of RaWrite, announced a new version. The new
version was supposed to run on ``nearly everything claiming to be
compatible with the original IBM-PC''. RaWrite was an MS-DOS utility that
was used to write out disk images (e.i. bootdisks) onto floppies. Under
Linux the equivalent command is ``dd if=diskimage of=/dev/fd0'' (if you
want to write to the first floppy). It was not possible to just copy the
floppy image file to the floppy under MS-DOS, since that would require the
floppy to have the DOS filesystem on it, which means that the disk would
have extraneous stuff on it, not just the parts in the image file.
Larry Butler announced an upload of xv 2.21 binaries. There was trouble with his first upload (compiled with debugging and hence very large binaries), but that got fixed quickly. |
| October 23, 1992 | Matthew Lewis announced an upload of dclock. |
| October 25, 1992 | Thomas Losin announced tvgalib, a graphics library for Trident 8900C cards. This was based on the vgalib library, which is for generic VGA. Neither requires or has anything to do with X or other windowing systems. |
| October 26, 1992 | Qi Xia announced a new program cksum, a (mostly) POSIX conforming
checksum program (not compatible with Unix sum).
Vince Skahan announced an upload of Newspak v1.0. It was a package of programs related to Usenet news ported to Linux. The included programs were: C-news (12/22/91), tin (1.1pl4), trn (2.2), smail (3.1.28). Newspak used programs from Mailpak (by Ed Carp), which provided uucp and mail for Linux. Thomas Dunbar announced TeX packaged as an SLS package. |
| October 27, 1992 | Linux v0.98.3: This version corrected most of the kernel NULL pointer reference problems. |
| November 7, 1992 | Doug Evans releases his Xenix filesystem for Linux (98p3). |
| November 19, 1992 | Fred Van Kampen releases: new enhanced version of Laurence Culhane's Slip (original released when?) ports berkeley talk/d, ftp/d, rsh/d, host, dig, telnetd, rlogind, uucpd, tftp/d, his own inetd and telnetd. |
| November 20, 1992 | Ross Biro releases port of the BSD lpr suite. |
| November 1992 | Andrew Tridgell releases an early version of a NetBios server. I believe this is the pre-origin of the Samba server. |
| December 2, 1992 | Jim Nance releases a program to let you install a linux system over the network (the first one?). |
| February 1993 | First port to non-intel systems (Amiga) begins. FAQ posted by Greg Harp. |
| February 1993 | van Kampen releases new Slip driver, using his new Device Driver interface, to keep drivers from having to break layering (slip used to muck in termio and serial layers). |
| April 1993 | van Kampen releases Net-2, which replace Biro's original TCP/IP code. The new version features: Net source layout, BSD-osh SIOCxxx ioctl calls (more BSD programs port to linux), ifconfig allows bit-wide netmasks and ip-routing, integrated Donald Beckers 8390 and plip drivers, new SLIP driver, actual /dev devices for TCP/IP, hooks for new IP router, improved ARP module. |
| May 1993 | Phil Hughes announces plans for Linux Journal. |
| September 17, 1993 | Alan Cox begins to take over networking as flamewars over Net-2 (van Kempen) vs, Net-1 (Biro) rage. He removes much of the new code for stability reasons and starts work on Net-2D (debugged). |
| September 21, 1993 | Alan Cox releases Net-2D (debugged). This is a release to provide a stable transition between Net-1 and Net-2. |
| November 29, 1993 | First Alpha release of Umsdos FS, to allow running Linux from a MS-DOS FAT partition. |
| December 1993 | Linux v0.99.14 |
| December 15, 1993 | van Kempen releases Beta-3 of Net-2E, while Johannes Stille releases his own passel of fixes to Beta-2. |
| January 18, 1994 | Peter MacDonald (SLS) releases patches agains 99p4f to make most device drivers loadable modules. This isn't the same module support that the Linux kernel now supports, though. |
| February 5, 1994 | Code Freeze for Linux v1.0 |
| February 18, 1994 | Daniel Quinlan releases 1.0 of the File System Standard. |
| February 26, 1994 | Ted Ts'o announces an Alpha release of a full-rewrite of the Linux tty driver. The two main new features: Allows new low-level drivers to be written, eliminating hard-coded TTY major numbers. Line discipline interfaces were revamped to speed TTY handling (speeding slip and ppp greatly) (FFSTND), replacing Clegg's earlier work. |
| March 1994 | Annoucement of foundation of Linux International. Its goals are: 1) encourage as many people, organizations, and communities as possible to start using Linux 2) promote the development and distribution of freely available software. |
| April 5, 1994 | First Alpha of iBCS2, which allows you to run SVr3 (including SCO) apps under Linux. |
| April 16, 1994 | Linux v1.0 |
| May 1994 | Alan Cox releases his Net-3, which is a partial re-write of Net-2. Cox more or less takes of major development of the Linux networking from van Kempen. |
| August 4, 1994 | First Beta of Redhat ships. |
| November 3, 1994 | First release of Redhat ships. |
| Linux v1.0 - v1.0.9 | |
| 1994 | Linux v1.0.9 (aka Linux '94) |
| March 2, 1995 | Linux v1.1 |
| 1995 | Linux v1.1 - v1.1.95 |
| March 13, 1995 | August 2, 1995 | Linux v1.2 (aka Linux '95): release announcement |
| 1995 | Linux v1.2 - v1.2.13 |
| 1995 | Linux v1.2.8 |
| June 6, 1996 | Linux v1.3 |
| 1996 | Linux v1.3 - (pre)v2.0.14 |
| 1996 | Linux v1.3.59 |
| 1996 | Linux v2.0 |
| August 11, 1997 | Linux v2.1 |
| 1997 | Linux v2.1 - v2.1.49 |
Bibliography: Aaron Thies, Linus Torvalds, Lars Wirzenius ,Mark P. Nelson, J. Richard Sladkey, Jonathan Magid, Lee Nevo