Red Hat Linux in 1998 (2009)

Summary

GNOME and Red Hat Linux Eleven Years Ago By Oscar Laycock Four years ago, I switched on an old PC and found a seven year old (at that time) copy of Linux on it. I still use parts of the 1998 Red Hat Linux, today. Red Hat Linux in 1998 My copy of Red Hat Linux is 5.1, codenamed "Manhattan". It was released on May 22, 1998. The first Red Hat Linux 1.0 was released on November 3, 1994. Finally, Red Hat Linux merged with Fedora on 22 September 2003, when Red Hat started Red Hat Enterprise Linux. I bought an official boxed set with a manual in the autumn of 1998, for £29.95 (British Pounds), from a mail-order catalogue. The catalogue also listed Slackware 3.5, Debian 1.3, TurboLinux 2.0, Caldera 1.2, FreeBSD 2.2.7, and BSD Lite 4.4. Before then, I had been using Coherent, a Unix Version 7 clone, originally produced for the PDP-11 in 1980 and ported to the IBM PC in 1983. The kernel is 2.0.34. It does not support thread-local storage, so I get an error when I run a program built with a recent compiler. Red Hat Linux 5.1 includes a "Linux Applications CD", a collection of third-party programs. It has versions of WordPerfect[1], Tripwire, and several relational databases. Free software in 1998 Netscape released the source code of its browser and Communicator suite on March 31, 1998. The GNU C Library, glibc, for my Red Hat 5.1 is version 2.0.7. Red Hat Linux 4.2, released in May 1997, was the last Red Hat Linux based on the Linux libc "libc 5". The Linux kernel developers had forked glibc in the early 1990's. Their last version was called libc.so.5. According to Wikipedia, "when FSF released glibc 2.0 in 1996, it had a much more complete POSIX standards support, better internationalisation/multilingual support, support for IPv6, 64-bit data access, support for multithreaded applications, future versions compatibility support, and the code was more portable. At this point, the Linux kernel developers discontinued their fork and returned to using FSF's glibc." The new glibc 2...