Owen Le Blanc: creator of the first Linux distribution

Some more context from a former colleague: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;techrights.org&#x2F;n&#x2F;2025&#x2F;05&#x2F;02&#x2F;Manchester_Computing_Centre_MCC_Made_the_First_GNU_Linux_Distro.shtml" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;techrights.org&#x2F;n&#x2F;2025&#x2F;05&#x2F;02&#x2F;Manchester_Computing_Cen...</a><p>MCC Interim Linux wikipedia page notes it started out with Linux kernel 0.12 <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;MCC_Interim_Linux" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;MCC_Interim_Linux</a><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.kernel.org&#x2F;pub&#x2F;linux&#x2F;kernel&#x2F;Historic&#x2F;old-versions&#x2F;RELNOTES-0.12" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.kernel.org&#x2F;pub&#x2F;linux&#x2F;kernel&#x2F;Historic&#x2F;old-version...</a><p>It makes me want to play, configure, compile, tidy and optimize! <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;ESP32DE&#x2F;Boot-Linux-ESP32S3-Playground">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;ESP32DE&#x2F;Boot-Linux-ESP32S3-Playground</a>

Owen used to organise the Manchester Linux User Group at the MCC as well, I fondly remember those early days when I was learning Linux. Looking back it was an amazing privilege to connect with some extremely knowledgeable people in the Linux ecosystem.

I still remember Owen showing me Linux (I was a Ph.D. student in the graphics lab at MCC, so this was probably around 92-93). He&#x27;s such a nice guy.<p>I had no idea he had such a claim to fame....though I suspect he didn&#x27;t either!

What a glorious piece of history. I wonder what other &quot;scratching my itch&quot; solutions became so mainstream that people forgot about the original authors.

Has the distribution model been good for Linux? It led to different approaches to things like desktop environments, packaging, and a variety of platforms, but 30+ years later, there are several sane choices for server distros, desktop distros are even more fragmented, and the most popular user distros are Android and ChromeOS.

This really brings back memories of how painful installing <i>any</i> software in the early 90s was. The small company I worked for got us a Yggdrasil CD to try but we were unable to get it installed on any of the PCs we had at the time. MCC might have done better, but we hadn&#x27;t heard of it.

The comments section on the article is nice, lots of people&#x27;s memory&#x27;s of MCC Interim Linux and Owen.

FWIW, I think I was the first person to ever produce a unix-like distribution for the Atari ST&#x2F;TT line in 1992. It installed MiNT (MiNT is Not Tos) on a free partition, with a minix filesystem and various optional disks (including make, ash, gcc, etc.)<p>The install-help docs were written using Calligrapher, an application I still think was way ahead of its time on the ST. There are postscript docs as well as ASCII ones at the link below.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;websites.umich.edu&#x2F;~archive&#x2F;atari&#x2F;Mint&#x2F;Distrib_kit&#x2F;Doc&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;websites.umich.edu&#x2F;~archive&#x2F;atari&#x2F;Mint&#x2F;Distrib_kit&#x2F;D...</a>

So first linux distribution was this one Feb 1992.<p>And first linux distribution with a GUI was &quot;TAMU linux&quot;, 3 months later: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;lwn.net&#x2F;Articles&#x2F;91371&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;lwn.net&#x2F;Articles&#x2F;91371&#x2F;</a><p>Both were released by universities

Ooh great to see this pop up on the HN front page - I have great memories of working with Owen at UoM :)

Previously: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=43782975">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=43782975</a> (no comments)