It’s often quite fun to take a look way back, and see just how far we’ve come since. This is a look back at what happened in the year 1998.

Operaring system versions in 1998:

• The Linux kernel versions 2.0.34, 2.0.35 and 2.0.36 were all released in 1998
• FreeBSD had quite a busy year: 2.2.6, 2.2.7, 2.2.8 and 3.0 were released
• OpenBSD released 2.3 and 2.4
• NetBSD launched major version 1.3 and it’s bugfix releases 1.3.1, 1.3.2 and 1.3.3
• RedHat released versions 5.1 and 5.2 of their Linux distributions
• Linux-Mandrake (now called Mandriva) released their first ever version 5.1 and 5.2 a while later, based on the RedHat releases
• Debian GNU/Linux released 2.0
• Slackware announced 3.5 and 3.6
• SuSE released 5.2
• Ubuntu … Heh, just kidding, Ubuntu didn’t even exist until 2004

Programming languages

• Perl was at 5.0
• Python was at 1.4
• PHP was at 3.0
• Ruby was at 1.2

Other interesting stuff:

january:

• Eight months after Eric S. Raymond’s well-known paper ‘The Cathedral and the Bazaar‘, Netscape Communications Inc. announces plans to give away the source for their Netscape Communicator browser suite.

• LWN (Linux Weekly News) launches their first issue

february:

• mozilla.org launches

• Eric S. Raymond and Bruce Perens form the Open Source Initiative

march:

• Trolltech’s Qt 2.0 Free Edition becomes open source

may:

• a new search engine comes online, they’ve called it ‘Google‘. You may have heard about it

june:

• The Gimp 1.0 was released

july:

• KDE 1.0 was released

october:

• Debian GNU/Linux drops KDE from its distribution due to Qt licensing issues

december:

• Gnome 1.0 enters code freeze
• Corel WordPerfect 8.0 for Linux arrives

These are just some highlights. If you care for a more complete overview of the happenings around Linux in 1998, LWN has it (I’ve used it as a source for quite a few items here).