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The Linux.org Story

Thread starter<br>Thread starter

Rob

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Sunday at 3:13 AM

Rob

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Linux.org has been online in some form since 1994, making it one of the earliest sites built around the Linux community. It's in good company among survivors from that era: LWN.net, still running continuously since 1997, Slashdot, which has been through several owners since its 1997 launch but is still around, and DistroWatch, tracking distributions since 2001. linux.org has had its own bumps along the way too, built, gone dark, rebuilt twice, and still independent today. Over 30 years old now, which in internet terms is close to the entire lifespan of the web itself!

Its history is less well known than the operating system it's named after, so here's the actual story, as best as it can be told.

The Beginning

The site was founded in May 1994 by Michael McLagan, at a time when Linux itself was barely three years old. Linus Torvalds had only just released it to the world, there was no real way for a newcomer to find their footing, no search engines, no Wikipedia, none of the infrastructure people take for granted now for figuring out a new piece of technology. Michael built linux.org to fill that gap, a place for people to learn about Linux and follow the movement as it grew.

By the late 1990s the site had become a fixture, offering things like:

Plain-language answers to basic questions: where to get Linux, whether it would run on a given machine, how to install it

Kernel news and release updates

Book reviews and recommendations

Coverage aimed at businesses considering Linux

Directories of distributions, hardware compatibility, vendors, and local user groups

It was a genuine hub at a time when the web itself was still young, and there wasn't anywhere else pulling all of that together in one place for someone just getting started. The community around it was small enough that people actually knew each other, or knew of each other, running their own little corners of the same movement. It didn't feel like an industry yet. It felt like a handful of people trying to make sure something good didn't get lost.

A Changing Landscape

Plenty of other sites and companies were part of that same era. LinuxMall was one of the biggest names in retail Linux CDs, alongside CheapBytes, back when buying a two-dollar CD-ROM was often the easiest way to get a working install. Freshmeat.net tracked new software releases for FOSS projects starting in 1997, changing hands a few times over the years before eventually closing down in 2014. LinuxToday.com, launched by Dave Whitinger and Dwight Johnson, became one of the most-read Linux news portals of its time. It's technically still online today, but really lost its spark after Dave sold it. Most of the others from that era are gone entirely, or exist only in name. linux.org is one of the few still standing, and still active, from that same period.

Going Dark

Michael passed away on November 5, 2010. He and I had known each other from the early Linux web, him running linux.org, me running my own site, linux-howto.com, which I started in 1998. We were part of the same small, scrappy corner of the internet, everyone building their own little piece of the Linux world by hand.

In the time after he passed, the site went dark. Exactly when isn't entirely clear, but by early 2012 it was offline and had been for a while, its old pages gone, its old community with nowhere to go.

The First Rebuild

I found out what had happened and reached out. Once I had the go-ahead, I rebuilt the site through my employer at the time, IQnection, restoring its original content from historical snapshots and bringing it back online.

That version got linux.org running again, and for a while it worked. But the arrangement supporting it wound down, and without it the site slowly faded a second time.

Doing It Right

In 2017, I came back to it, this time on my own, and reached an agreement directly with Michael's widow to take on running the site properly, for good this time. I moved it to my own infrastructure, took full responsibility for keeping it online, and put my own time into building it into something sustainable rather than just alive, adding a forum so the site could be a community again, and tracking down broken links and setting up redirects so the site's years of accumulated history on the web wouldn't just evaporate. New articles, maintenance, an actual plan instead of a rescue.

Where It Stands...