Illustrated article: "The History of S.u.S.E."

Histories
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From S.u.S.E. to SuSE to SUSE, from localising Slackware to creating a port for IBM’s S/390, from 386 to Alpha, PPC, and SPARC, to Itanium, AMD64, and zSeries, a small team in Germany becomes a multinational company, becomes a supplier of enterprise products.

With plenty of screenshots of early installation flows.

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They were among the first resellers of Yggdrasil, and they also had their semi-localized versions of SLS and Slackware, along with patch sets.
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Sure, one could download all forty Slackware floppy disk images, but it would take quite a bit of time on a 28.8kbps modem. … After what may have been intermittent work over the course of a few days, the potential Linux user was then greeted with a command line in a foreign language. The alternative was to call up S.u.S.E. with a number found in an advertisement in a trade magazine and get a CD-ROM for your 386/486 PC that had been localized to your own language

In 1994, S.u.S.E released a fully localized version of Slackware Linux 2.0 with some patches and software incorporated from other Linux distributions, S.u.S.E. Linux 1.0.

S.u.S.E. Linux version 5 was released in July of 1997, and that was the version to begin the transition of the distribution to RPMs. Slackware’s TGZs were still supported. That release used kernel 2.0.30, Bash 2.0, Qt 1.2, XFree86 3.3 and FVWM 4.0.45. October of that year saw the release of version 5.1 with the most notable changes being the support of FTP package updates and KDE. This version was five CD-ROMs. Four of these were for the installation, and one was for the LiveCD environment.

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On the 27th of September in 2000, SuSE Linux version 7 was released. SuSE Linux Professional 7.0 consisted of six CD-ROMs and one DVD for those who had a DVD-ROM drive, two floppies for those who couldn’t boot from optical media, a quick install guide, a handbook, a configuration guide, and an applications guide. By this point, like many other commercial Linux distributions, SuSE included StarOffice, Netscape, Acrobat, GIMP, Sane, KDE, and other familiar applications. It had a graphical YaST2 setup tool, ReiserFS and ext2 filesystems, RPM package management, and retailed for $69.99. SuSE Linux Personal lacked many of the proprietary applications and shipped on three CDs. This version saw released for x86, Alpha, PPC, and SPARC.

probably via HN

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I think, it’s important to remember that these distributions came at a cost. In theory, you could download the distribution via FTP, but if you hadn’t a professional connection, this was quite unrealistic to do and also quite expensive, when using a modem, or even via paired ISDN (since the FTP servers were quite slow).

At that time, I had a box, where I experimented with a number of systems – and CD/DVD distributions were all at about that price. The cheapest one was actually a proprietary Unix, Solaris PC Edition, which came just at the price of the medium. Which is actually remarkable, since this included a license for Display PostScript. (I think, Free BSD was about the same.)

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