Yggdrasil Linux/GNU/X, or LGX (pronounced ''igg-drah-sill''), is an early

Linux distribution A Linux distribution, often abbreviated as distro, is an operating system that includes the Linux kernel for its kernel functionality. Although the name does not imply product distribution per se, a distro—if distributed on its own—is oft ...

developed by Yggdrasil Computing, Incorporated, a company founded by Adam J. Richter in

Berkeley, California Berkeley ( ) is a city on the eastern shore of San Francisco Bay in northern Alameda County, California, United States. It is named after the 18th-century Anglo-Irish bishop and philosopher George Berkeley. It borders the cities of Oakland, Cali ...

. Yggdrasil was the first company to create a

live CD A live CD (also live DVD, live disc, or live operating system) is a complete booting, bootable computer installation including operating system which runs directly from a CD-ROM or similar storage device into a computer's memory, rather than lo ...

Linux distribution. Yggdrasil Linux described itself as a "

Plug-and-Play In computing, a plug and play (PnP) device or computer bus is one with a specification that facilitates the recognition of a hardware component in a system without the need for physical device configuration or user intervention in resolving resou ...

" Linux distribution, automatically configuring itself for the hardware.

Yggdrasil Yggdrasil () is an immense and central sacred tree in Norse cosmology. Around it exists all else, including the Nine Worlds. Yggdrasil is attested in the ''Poetic Edda'' compiled in the 13th century from earlier traditional sources, and in t ...

is the World Tree of

Norse mythology Norse, Nordic, or Scandinavian mythology, is the body of myths belonging to the North Germanic peoples, stemming from Old Norse religion and continuing after the Christianization of Scandinavia as the Nordic folklore of the modern period. The ...

. The name was chosen because Yggdrasil took disparate pieces of software and assembled them into a complete product. Yggdrasil's company motto was "Free Software For The Rest of Us". Yggdrasil is compliant with the Unix

Filesystem Hierarchy Standard The Filesystem Hierarchy Standard (FHS) is a reference describing the conventions used for the layout of Unix-like systems. It has been made popular by its use in Linux distributions, but it is used by other Unix-like systems as well. It is main ...

.Linux SIG - Yggdrasil's Plug and Play Linux
/ref>

History and releases

Yggdrasil announced their ‘bootable Linux/GNU/X-based UNIX(R) clone for PC compatibles’ on 25 November 1992 and made the first release on 8 December 1992. This alpha release contained the 0.98.1 version of the

Linux kernel The Linux kernel is a Free and open-source software, free and open source Unix-like kernel (operating system), kernel that is used in many computer systems worldwide. The kernel was created by Linus Torvalds in 1991 and was soon adopted as the k ...

, the v11r5 version of the

X Window System The X Window System (X11, or simply X) is a windowing system for bitmap displays, common on Unix-like operating systems. X originated as part of Project Athena at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1984. The X protocol has been at ...

supporting up to 1024x768 with 256 colours, various GNU utilities such as their C/C++ compiler, the

GNU Debugger The GNU Debugger (GDB) is a portable debugger that runs on many Unix-like systems and works for many programming languages, including Ada, Assembly, C, C++, D, Fortran, Haskell, Go, Objective-C, OpenCL C, Modula-2, Pascal, Rust, and par ...

bison A bison (: bison) is a large bovine in the genus ''Bison'' (from Greek, meaning 'wild ox') within the tribe Bovini. Two extant taxon, extant and numerous extinction, extinct species are recognised. Of the two surviving species, the American ...

, flex, and make,

TeX Tex, TeX, TEX, may refer to: People and fictional characters * Tex (nickname), a list of people and fictional characters with the nickname * Tex Earnhardt (1930–2020), U.S. businessman * Joe Tex (1933–1982), stage name of American soul singer ...

, groff,

Ghostscript Ghostscript is a suite of software based on an interpreter for Adobe Systems' PostScript and Portable Document Format (PDF) page description languages. Its main purposes are the rasterization of documents in these language,, the display or prin ...

, the elvis and

Emacs Emacs (), originally named EMACS (an acronym for "Editor Macros"), is a family of text editors that are characterized by their extensibility. The manual for the most widely used variant, GNU Emacs, describes it as "the extensible, customizable, s ...

editors, and various other software. Yggdrasil's alpha release required a 386 computer with 8 MB RAM and 100 MB hard disk. The alpha release was missing some of the

source code In computing, source code, or simply code or source, is a plain text computer program written in a programming language. A programmer writes the human readable source code to control the behavior of a computer. Since a computer, at base, only ...

of some of the packages, such as elvis. A beta release was made on 18 February 1993.DistroWatch.com: Put the fun back into computing. Use Linux, BSD
/ref> The beta's cost was

US$ The United States dollar (Currency symbol, symbol: Dollar sign, $; ISO 4217, currency code: USD) is the official currency of the United States and International use of the U.S. dollar, several other countries. The Coinage Act of 1792 introdu ...

60. LGX's beta release in 1993 contained the 0.99.5 version of the Linux kernel, along with other software from

GNU GNU ( ) is an extensive collection of free software (394 packages ), which can be used as an operating system or can be used in parts with other operating systems. The use of the completed GNU tools led to the family of operating systems popu ...

and X. By 22 August 1993, the Yggdrasil company had sold over 3100 copies of the LGX beta distribution. The production release version carried a pricetag of US$99. However, Yggdrasil was offered for free to any developer whose software was included with the CD distribution. According to an email from the company's founder the marginal cost of each subscription was $35.70. Early Yggdrasil releases were also available from stores selling CD-ROM software.Archaeology
/ref>

Yggdrasil Computing, Incorporated

Adam J. Richter started the Yggdrasil company together with Bill Selmeier. Richter spoke to

Michael Tiemann Michael Tiemann is an American software developer and executive, serving as vice president of open source affairs at Red Hat, Inc., and former President of the Open Source Initiative. Biography He earned a bachelor's degree from the Moore Schoo ...

about setting up a business, but was not interested in joining forces with Cygnus. Richter was a member of

League for Programming Freedom League for Programming Freedom (LPF) was founded in 1989 by Richard Stallman to unite free software developers as well as developers of proprietary software to fight against software patents and the extension of the scope of copyright. Their logo ...

. Richter was using only a 200 MB hard disk when building the alpha release of LGX, which prevented him from practically being able to include the source code of some of the packages contained in the CDROM. Yggdrasil Incorporated published some of the early Linux compilation books, such as ''The Linux Bible: The GNU Testament'' (), and contributed significantly to file system and X Window System functionality of Linux in the early days of their operation. The company moved to

San Jose, California San Jose, officially the City of San José ( ; ), is a cultural, commercial, and political center within Silicon Valley and the San Francisco Bay Area. With a city population of 997,368 and a metropolitan area population of 1.95 million, it is ...

in 1996. In 1996, Yggdrasil Incorporated released the Winter 1996 edition of ''Linux Internet Archives''; six CDs of Linux software from Tsx-11 and Sunsite, the GNU archive on prep.ai.mit.edu, the X11R6 archives including the free contributed X11R6 software from ftp.x.org, the Internet RFC standards, and a total of nine non-Yggdrasil Linux distributions. The company remained active until at least year 2000, when it released the Linux Open Source DVD, but its website was taken offline afterwards and the company has not released anything since. The company's last corporate filing was in January 2004. The California Secretary of State lists it as suspended. The company once made an offer to donate 60% of the Yggdrasil CDROM sales revenues to the

Computer Systems Research Group The Computer Systems Research Group (CSRG) was a research group at the University of California, Berkeley, that was dedicated to enhancing AT&T Unix operating system and funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. History Profes ...

, but founder Adam J. Richter later indicated that the company would lose too much money and changed the offer accordingly, while still maintaining donations to CSRG.*BSD News Article 1861
/ref> The company also had volume discount plans.

References

External links

Yggrasil Linux/GNU/X operating system distribution from 1995
(images)
ibiblio's mirror of 1996's release of Yggrasil Linux/GNU/X operating system distribution
(docs)
DistroWatch on Yggdrasil

{{DEFAULTSORT:Yggdrasil Linux Gnu X 1992 software Discontinued Linux distributions

History and releases

Yggdrasil Computing, Incorporated

See also

References

External links