The first release was Ubuntu 4.10 "Warthy Warthog"

Oct 20, 2014 08:24 GMT  ·  By

Mark Shuttleworth announced Ubuntu 4.10 "The Warty Warthog Release" on October 20, 2004. It's hard to believe that a decade has passed since then, but we are now getting ready for Ubuntu 14.10 "Utopic Unicorn."

It's difficult to anticipate early on if a Linux distro will become a success, even after just a few editions, but Mark Shuttleworth did something very different for the open source world. He brought money into the mix and didn't ask for something in return.

This is how the market usually works; if you invest money into a product, you are going to sell that product. Canonical, the company founded by Mark Shuttleworth, which builds this open source project, is not asking for money and they deliver the operating system for free. Mark even said, on numerous occasions, that Ubuntu would always be free.

Ubuntu 4.10 "The Warty Warthog Release" started it all

Who knew that a Linux distro called Ubuntu would not only surpass some of the great names of the day, like Fedora or Debian, but it would also become the most used in the world? It took some time, but a big Ubuntu community was formed and the inertia of the operating system has never been higher.

"The warm-hearted Warthogs of the Warty Team are proud to present the very first release of Ubuntu! Ubuntu is a new Linux distribution that brings together the extraordinary breadth of Debian with a fast and easy install, regular releases (every six months), a tight selection of excellent packages installed by default and a commitment to security updates with 18 months of security and technical support for every release," said Mark Shuttleworth in the announcement.

He also enumerated some of the features that users could expect from the distribution, such as "security updates for the distribution at no charge for 18 months for any release, updated to the latest desktop and kernel and infrastructure every six months with a new release, and x86, amd64 and ppc processors support."

Ubuntu 4.10 was built, just like it is to this very day, on Debian, but it was using the GNOME 2.8.x desktop environment. It wasn't terribly unique at that time, but things have changed a lot since then.

Now, 10 years later, Canonical is about to release Ubuntu 14.10 "Utopic Unicorn," its latest iteration. It still has pretty much the same guideline, with the exception of the support period, which is now just nine months.

So, there is only one thing left to say: happy birthday, Ubuntu!