See also: last week's Linux History page.

This week in Linux history

Four years ago: Pacific HiTech release its new product: "Turbo Linux Red Hat 4.0". The "Turbo Linux" distribution has, of course, come a long way since then...

Two years ago (January 21, 1999 LWN): ZDNet looked at what Pacific HiTech had in mind:

Coming out in March will be Pacific HiTech's new TurboLinux Enterprise Server 3.0, bundled with numerous apps, including five licenses for the Oracle 8 database. [CEO Cliff] Miller, eyeing the higher-end corporate marketplace, is mulling over a starting price of several thousand dollars.

Well, it was a nice idea...

Samba 2.0 was released after a long development period. Such was the stability of that release that, two years later, the world is running happily with 2.0.7 (though a 2.2 alpha release is available).

The "Windows refund" movement got started after a couple of Linux users managed to get their money back for the (unused) Windows software that came with their new computers.

Corel sold its Netwinder division to a company called Hardware Canada Computing - since renamed Rebel.com.

The current development kernel was 2.2.0pre8 - one of the last steps in the path to the 2.2.0 release.

Debian 2.1 ("slink") went into "deep freeze" prior to its official release - which was, of course, longer in coming than expected.

TurboLinux 3.0.1 was released. It was the first version of TurboLinux to be sold as a boxed set.

One year ago (January 20, 2000 LWN): The first serious enforcement of the Linux trademark came about, in the form of a shutdown of an auction of 250 Linux domain names. These names included useful domains like "LinuxOnSteriods.com" and "ScreaminLinux.com." Alas, Linus shut down the auction and those names remain unused.

Linuxcare filed for its initial public offering of stock; interested folks can read our summary of that filing. This IPO never happened, of course, due to a combination of unfriendly markets and internal troubles at Linuxcare.

The development kernel release was 2.3.39. It became increasingly apparent that a 2.4.0 release was not going to happen anytime soon after Linus let in a number of major changes.

Debian 2.2 ("potato") went into code freeze:

"The code freeze for the next Debian release, code named "potato", has begun", says Richard Braakman, current Debian Release Manager. He expects the freeze process to take about two months.

2.2 was actually released in August... Linux-Mandrake 7.0 was released, as was Red Hat 6.1 for the Alpha architecture.

The world finally found out what Transmeta was up to.

Turbolinux announced the closing of a $57 million funding round.

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