Ten years ago Judd released the first version of Arch Linux. This is quite an age for a Linux distribution and we are still rolling. Allan just posted a brief history of mile stones that were important to him. Inspired by this nice idea…I am going to do exactly the same.

It has been a long time but it seems I started a more serious look at Linux back in April 2003. That time I joined linuxforen.de.

In June 2004 I came in contact with Arch when I was looking for a lightweight and technical easy distribution with rolling releases.

Here is the Arch Linux history from my perspective:

These are some information about my history at Arch I could gather in a reasonable amount of time. It has been fun to dig through all these old mails. Some information are hard to get or lost forever as we changed our mailing lists, forums, wiki and even switched from cvs to svn in the meantime.

I probably could have added dates to the timeline forever. But I’ll just stop here to keep it less boring. If I had missed anything important, let me know. Also I didn’t add other conference we had attended like last years FrOSCon, OpenRheinRuhr or FOSDEM as I simply have no pictures of those.

At this point I am still working on getting PHP 5.4 ready for action and helping to finalize the package signing process. I am also working on repository management and on the package building process in general. There will be separate articles about these ideas.

If you like to have a look at the very first version of Arch: I have uploaded arch-0.1-full-i686.iso to our mirrors. It’s md5sum is:

03cece0ee5ba6ffdaedb450baa7589b2