Ubuntu can be seen as a fairly new Linux distribution. Although its first version was released only 3 years ago, in October, 2004, it is one of the most well-known and widely used Linux distributions. How did Ubuntu come into existence? What is the secret of its great success? How well was its first version received? It can be due to Ubuntu's short history that only a few writings exist about the birth and the earlier days of this distribution. Information about that time can only be gathered together from mailing lists, from notes accompanying presentations, and from articles of that period. The founding father of Ubuntu is Mark Shuttleworth, a South-African entrepreneur. He is famous for being the first African who travelled in space, but only a few people know that his enterprise, which made his fortune, used Debian operating system, and that he was the first to upload the Apache server application to the repositories of Debian. Therefore, it is clear why he chose Debian as the base for the new distribution. The development of Ubuntu started around April, 2004 as a top-secret project. That month was the time of presenting ideas, and the first plans were also drawn up. The first group of developers started to work full-time on the project at around May or June. Mark Shuttleworth aimed at collecting the best Debian developers, so that an elite team could work on the new distribution. However, this time the project had no name, and the no-name-yet.com site served as a place to hold the work together. It was quite obvious that something was happening behind the scenes, as patches for Debian continuously arrived from no-name-yet.com, but only very few had more information about it. The codename, Warty Warthog was created at an early stage of development, and it became later the name of the first release of Ubuntu. Since that time the development codename of a release takes the form "Adjective Animal". Mark Shuttleworth recalls the first naming procedure as the following: “Many sensible people have wondered why we chose this naming scheme. It came about as a joke on a ferry between Circular Quay and somewhere else, in Sydney: lifeless: how long before we make a first release? sabdfl: it would need to be punchy. six months max. lifeless: six months! thats not a lot of time for polish. sabdfl: so we'll have to nickname it the warty warthog release. And voila, the name stuck.” source. The launch of Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu, was announced by Matt Zimmerman on the debian-devel mailing list on the 21st July. He wrote that developers were working on a Debian-based distribution; however, the name Ubuntu was still unknown, only the codename of the first release (Warty Warthog) was made known to the readers of the mailing list. It was also made clear that “it will be free of charge, and will be Free Software.” and that “they will contribute bug fixes and improvements back to the Debian community as they make them -- not just at release time.” The first Ubuntu Developer Summit was held in August, 2004 in Oxford. The name Ubuntu was also first used there, and it started to spread through different mailing lists and blogs at the end of August. However, the name and the distribution was officially announced only on 15th September, 2004, and from that day on, the Ubuntu 4.10 Preview could also be downloaded. That was the first distribution that came with Gnome 2.8, which was released on the same day. In Hungary, the first to report on the release of Ubuntu was the HUP (Hungarian Unix Portal) on 17 September, 2004. The OSNews professional site had published an interview on the occasion of the birth of Ubuntu the day before. Distrowatch, which is considered to be the official compiler of the list of Linux distributions, told about Ubuntu in a newsletter on the 20th September. This was an important moment in the life of Ubuntu, because, as the phrase goes among Linux users, the distribution which is not listed on Distrowatch does not exist. Ubuntu met with a great response from the beginnings. Articles and news describing the features of Ubuntu were published in huge numbers all around the world, and many were anxiously waiting for the first Ubuntu version, Warty Warthog, which finally was released on the 20th October. One of the major events in the history of Ubuntu was its introduction at the Mexican GULEV conference on 27th November, 2004. The presentation was held by Benjamin Mako Hill. When he had previously told “folks” in the Ubuntu IRC channel that others who were going to give presentations are Randal L. Schwartz, Jon "Maddog" Hall, and Richard Stallman, they, not surprisingly, asked whether his name was in parentheses. Well, it was not... The slides and notes made for the presentation can be found on Benjamin Mako Hill's website, which is one of the most interesting and exciting sources from the period of the beginnings of Ubuntu. After reading the notes, one can see that since the birth of Ubuntu the aim of developers has been to create a refined, easily usable, and friendly Linux distribution. It also turns out that developers will hardly forget the dates of the different releases because previous to them they had not slept for about a week. One can also get to know that Python is not unintentionally the programming language of Ubuntu-specific improvements, since one goal of the developers is "python everywhere." Mark Shuttleworth especially loves Python. Warty Warthog was followed by Hoary Hedgehog in April, 2005. This version was more polished, came with a nicer user interface than the previous one, and managed to persuade sceptics that Ubuntu is worth being taken seriously. And since then, it has been enjoying an unbroken success. Sources and references: The first news about Ubuntu on the HUP (Hungarian Unix Portal) Distrowatch Newsletter 2004-09-20 Interview with Jeff Waugh On Ubuntu Linux (OSNews) Jonathan Riddel's blog (august, 2004) Benjamin Mako Hill's site Benjamin Mako Hill's presentation notes (GULEV 2004) Mark Shuttleworth on Ubuntu Wiki translated by: Hajnalka Horváth