The original name of LMLinux was "OS", or "VN/Linux". The idea started life when the administrators of a relatively large Internet company needed a faster way to get instals done. When you have 10 servers to deploy today, there's no time to be playing around with installing, configuring, and upgrading each one individually.

The original version was based on Slackware 7.x. It simply consisted of a script which installed base packages, and extracted two tar files which contained all of /etc/ and /host/ (the web server partition)

As time progressed, we refined the process. With VN/Linux release 1.4, a bootable CD was now available, and the process began to be streamlined.

The time line of these releases is:

• Aug 24 2001 os v1.1 (tar.gz)
• Dec 4 2001 os v1.2 (tar.gz)
• May 14 2002 os v1.3 (tar.gz)
• Feb 11 2003 os v1.4 (iso)
• May 12 2003 os v1.5 (iso)
• Jun 25 2003 os v1.5.1 (iso) - bugfixes
• Mar 01 2004 os v1.6 (iso)
• Apr 13 2004 LMLinux.com registered
• Apr 21 2004 os v1.6.1 (iso) fixes to two scripts
• Oct 07 2004 os v1.7.1 (iso)
• Nov->Dec 2004 os v1.7.2 and v1.7.3 - Aborted.

VN/Linux is quite literally Slackware, with our own tuning. It would be like if you installed Slackware, and spent the next two weeks doing things to it. Once you're done, it's not really much like what it started as. We've taken the resulting work, and used that for the basis of VN/Linux.

We really do love Slackware. LMLinux is intended to be our own distro, for our servers. We still use Slackware on our workstations, and laptops.

We had intended to make LMLinux it's own full distro from source, but that is a time consuming process, and tends to make for headaches keeping up with bugs.