Greetings Steemit! This time we gonna make our very own Linux Distro Timeline.

What is GLDT (GNU/Linux Distro TimeLine)? It's a tree, basically. With Linux Distributions. More specifically, it's a gnuclad tree. I'm going to show you what I mean:

Gnuclad

But what the hell is gnuclad? It's quite old program (latest release was in the middle of 2010's), which still works and correctly draws pretty-view trees in Linux. That's the power of Linux! All these updates still didn't broke this old piece of software. Let's download and build it:

Ubuntu

If you're on one of the most popular distros, please make this commands:

    sudo apt install inkscape
    wget https://launchpad.net/gnuclad/trunk/0.2/+download/gnuclad-0.2.4.tar.gz
    tar -xvf gnuclad-0.2.4.tar.gz
    cd gnuclad-0.2.4/
    sh configure
    make
    sudo make install

We are installing inkscape because we need it to produce PNG from SVG.

If the "sh configure" command says you don't have the C compiler or something, do the sudo apt install gcc beforehead, and then continue from sh configure step and on.

Arch

If you're on Arch Linux or Manjaro, build process is much easier - we already have the AUR package which is, of course, named "gnuclad". Just do: yaourt -S gnuclad or packer -S gnuclad and agree to compile the package. Nice!

Next step: drawing

Now we have the gnuclad installed in our system. And we can "draw" or "compile" the image with it. Let's download the source repo:
git clone https://github.com/FabioLolix/LinuxTimeline

Okay, now we can actually draw. Let's try it!

cd LinuxTimeline
./build.sh

Now you should see something like this:

gnuclad 0.2.4: gldt.csv => gldt.svg
Computing cladogram for 577 nodes, 126 connectors and 6 domains...
Done
Background RRGGBBAA: ffffff00
Area -31:0:2820:12664 exported to 2851 x 12664 pixels (96 dpi)
Bitmap saved as: gldt.png
Packaging...
Distribution can be found in DIST_gldt

If you see similar output, everything went fine and you should have the "DIST_gldt" folder inside the LinuxTimeline folder. Go there with your file manager to find the gldt.svg and gldt.png files accordingly.

You can now print out this pretty graphics or just open it with any viewer and look at the development of one of the largest OS community in the world.

Full Timeline (Oct 2018)

or https://imgur.com/VgRID3s

Hope this small build manual will be useful for those, who's interested about Linux history.

Source repo

https://github.com/FabioLolix/LinuxTimeline

Used tools

• gnuclad
• gcc
• inkscape

Improvements & development

If you like to help to improve this tree, please follow github and review the README to help this project.

Cheers,
Den Ivanov aka @sxiii from Random City