Jurix
Encyclopedia
jurix is an early day, mainly floppy based Linux
Linux
Linux is a Unix-like computer operating system assembled under the model of free and open source software development and distribution. The defining component of any Linux system is the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released October 5, 1991 by Linus Torvalds...

 distribution that is now discontinued. It was created and maintained by Florian La Roche from the legal department at Saarland University
Saarland University
Saarland University is a university located in Saarbrücken, the capital of the German state of Saarland, and Homburg. It was founded in 1948 in Homburg in co-operation with France and is organized in 8 faculties that cover all major fields of science...

, and stamped with a copyright for at least the span from 1994 to 1996. In the end of the period two forth-level domains "jurix" and "susix," underneath "jura.uni-sb.de," were used for communicating and publishing of the distribution.

As documented in the web, the origins of the name jurix aren't from La Roche but from Alexander Sigel, a staff member at the University of Saarland. In 1994 Sigel named the department's first internet server "jurix". There is no indication if the name was in any way related to the nearby dutch law and IT organisation JURIX
JURIX
JURIX is a foundation based in the Netherlands that deals with legal subjects in relation to information technology and especially interconnects computer and legal scientists from that country. It is known for organizing the so called open and international JURIX conferences that are held annually...

 or rather just a portmanteau between "Jura" and "Unix"/"Linux". In 1995 La Roche officially became systems administrator for the "jurix" server.

A discussion on the history of Linux contained that quote:
Fabian (in fact meant: Florian La Roche) had previously been in the Debian
Debian
Debian is a computer operating system composed of software packages released as free and open source software primarily under the GNU General Public License along with other free software licenses. Debian GNU/Linux, which includes the GNU OS tools and Linux kernel, is a popular and influential...

 project, but left due to the fighting. The initial version of JURIX were tarballs.


The last known still archived distribution had this basic features:
jurix is a Linux distribution with the following features: kernel 1.3.91, libc 5.2.18, gcc 2.7.2, ncurses 1.9.9e, shadow passwords, XFree86 3.1.2-S, tcl 7.5b3, tk 4.1b3. - jurix readme, Florian La Roche, 24th April 1996


The jurix distribution was ahead of its time, besides the common features in other distributions of the era, it touted several more features including a scriptable installer that allowed the reproduction of a certain installation setup (on a set of relatively similar machines.) Standards like bootp and NFS were supported. The main file system intended for use was the ext2
Ext2
The ext2 or second extended filesystem is a file system for the Linux kernel. It was initially designed by Rémy Card as a replacement for the extended file system ....

 file system.

This jurix distribution later on formed the starting point for creating the SuSE Linux distribution. In the progress the creator of jurix joined SuSE as well and was then creator and responsible for e.g. the installer and configuration tool YaST.

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