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 made from a software collection that includes the Linux kernel and, often, a package management system. Linux users usually obtain their operating system by downloading on ...

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 Irish bishop and philosopher George Berkeley. It borders the cities of Oakland and Emer ...

. 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 bootable computer installation including operating system which runs directly from a CD-ROM or similar storage device into a computer's memory, rather than loading f ...

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 (from Old Norse ), in Norse cosmology, is an immense and central sacred tree. Around it exists all else, including the Nine Worlds. Yggdrasil is attested in the '' Poetic Edda'' compiled in the 13th century from earlier tradition ...

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, and into the Nordic folklore of the modern peri ...

. 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 a UNIX system. It has been made popular by its use in Linux distributions, but it is used by other UNIX variants as well. It is maintained b ...

.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 24 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, monolithic, modular, multitasking, Unix-like operating system kernel. It was originally authored in 1991 by Linus Torvalds for his i386-based PC, and it was soon adopted as the kernel for the GNU ...

, 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 provides the basic framework for a GUI environment: drawing and moving windows on the display device and interacting ...

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, C, C++, Objective-C, Free Pascal, Fortran, Go, and partially others. History GDB was first writte ...

bison Bison are large bovines in the genus ''Bison'' (Greek: "wild ox" (bison)) within the tribe Bovini. Two extant and numerous extinct species are recognised. Of the two surviving species, the American bison, ''B. bison'', found only in North ...

flex Flex or FLEX may refer to: Computing * Flex (language), developed by Alan Kay * FLEX (operating system), a single-tasking operating system for the Motorola 6800 * FlexOS, an operating system developed by Digital Research * FLEX (protocol), a ...

, and

make Make or MAKE may refer to: *Make (magazine), a tech DIY periodical *Make (software), a software build tool *Make, Botswana, in the Kalahari Desert *Make Architects Make Architects is an international architecture practice headquartered in London ...

TeX Tex may refer to: People and fictional characters * Tex (nickname), a list of people and fictional characters with the nickname * Joe Tex (1933–1982), stage name of American soul singer Joseph Arrington Jr. Entertainment * ''Tex'', the Italian ...

, 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 or rendering of such page description language file ...

, the

elvis Elvis Aaron Presley (January 8, 1935 – August 16, 1977), or simply Elvis, was an American singer and actor. Dubbed the " King of Rock and Roll", he is regarded as one of the most significant cultural figures of the 20th century. His ener ...

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, ...

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, is any collection of code, with or without comment (computer programming), comments, written using a human-readable programming language, usually as plain text. The source code of a Computer program, p ...

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 (symbol: $; code: USD; also abbreviated US$ or U.S. Dollar, to distinguish it from other dollar-denominated currencies; referred to as the dollar, U.S. dollar, American dollar, or colloquially buck) is the official ...

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 Free software or libre software is computer software distributed under terms that allow users to run the software for any purpose as well as to study, change, and distribute it and any ...

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> A community effort in continuing the development of Yggdrasil has been started in early 2022, having an alpha release planned to be on late March or early April 2022.

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 School ...

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 San José (; ; ), is a major city in the U.S. state of California that is the cultural, financial, and political center of Silicon Valley and largest city in Northern California by both population and area. With a 2020 popul ...

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 Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. History Professor B ...

, 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