4. Hall of Remembrance

Corel Linux

(since relegating this distribution to the Hall of Remembrance , several rather angry e-mails have pointed out to me that it still survives, although apparently not under the same name. Sorry about that. - msw)

            Xandros Corporation
            600-1410 Blair Place
            Ottawa
            Ontario
            CANADA K1J 9B9
    

            Net: feedback@xandros.com
            WWW: http://www.xandros.com
            FTP:
            Vox: (613)-842-3494
            Fax: (613)-842-3499
    

Xandros is developing a customized Debian-based Linux distribution that is derived from version 3.0 of the award winning Corel LINUX OS. It will support both the KDE and Gnome desktop environments. In addition to the features that Linux users expect, Xandros will be distributing significant additions and enhancements. Furthermore, Xandros is creating a server and enterprise management solution that will significantly reduce the total cost of ownership of computing environments. The overall solution is complete "off the shelf", but Xandros Professional Services can customize and integrate the products as well as provide enhancements to legacy systems as needed. Finally, all Xandros offerings will be backed by world-class support.

http://www.xandros.com/downloads.html

Corel Linux is NOT supported by Xandros Corp.

An entry for the Xandros distribution should be added to the live HOWTO as soon as it is updated (early 2002?).

Linux-FT

One of the earlier of the prepackaged distributions of Linux, it was sold in England by Lasermoon, who were also one of the early resellers of Slackware on CD-Rom. Much of the design of Linux-FT was based on a German original distribution by Unifix - occasionally, error messages had a disconcerting habit of coming up in the wrong language!

The distribution was started in 1995-96 and lasted for two or three years. Noteworthy features included a licensed copy of the Motif window manager; and an experimental live filing system whereby much of the system ran from CD and applications were cached if not used. The distribution was also one of the first to convert to ELF format for binaries. This was a very polished product in versions 1.0 - 1.2. There was a very long hiatus until version 2.0 was released and many of the promised features did not materialise in the final version released as 2.0.

Unifix did considerable work on establishing POSIX compliance for Linux-FT: Ian Nandhra of Lasermoon established a company to produce Linux tools running on a Microsoft Windows operating system (Insignix?) which was later purchased by Microsoft. There are rumours that the POSIX subsystem in Windows NT 4.0 is a modified Linux product stemming from this.

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Softlanding Linux

(Within 12 hours of publishing this wiki version, I received the following e-mail from the author of the CDServer-HOWTO)

"I ran across your "English-language GNU/Linux distributions on CD-ROM" and happened to be reading your personal opinions. This had me reminiscing about my first experience with Linux. Took me a while to remember the name of it, Softlanding Linux System (SLS) ... I did remember the kernel version was 0.97. I wondered what had happened to that distribution (that I incidentally had downloaded onto floppies in early '93).

"All the while, I thought I may have had a submission for your Hall of Remembrance . I entered "softlanding" into Google and found that the Softlanding distribution was actually an early version of what SUSE was based on! Even more to my surprise, I learned that Slackware was also initially based on SLS.

"All the while, I thought I may have had a submission for your Hall of Remembrance . I entered "softlanding" into Google and found that the Softlanding distribution was actually an early version of what SUSE was based on! Even more to my surprise, I learned that Slackware was also initially based on SLS.

"Anyway, thanks for the great reading and the history lesson :-).

"Here's a couple of the articles I had found... probably not pertinent to your distributions document, but fun to read none-the-less.

http://www.developer.ibm.com/library/articles/schenk2b.html http://www.linuxuser.co.uk/articles/issue9/lu9-All_you_need_to_know_about-The_early_history_of_Linux_part_2.pdf

"Best regards,

"Randy Tata Author: CDServer-HOWTO"

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Storm Linux

Storm Linux was a Debian-derived distribution from a Canadian firm which aimed to produce an easier to use Debian. Unfortunately their venture did not prove profitable and, with reluctance, they were obliged to cease trading in late 2001.

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