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Yes. IIRC the very first version was basically a german translation of Slackware.

Yes, SUSE indeed started as a modified version of Slackware. For a long time, SUSE's package categories names were based on Slackware's disk sets names (even after rebasing away from Slackware). Later, SUSE hired the author of the Jurix distribution and rebased on top of that. SUSE and Jurix were both from Germany.

History of Jurix: http://linux2.mathematik.tu-darmstadt.de/pub/linux/distribut...

SUSE had a stronghold in the nineties in Europe. E.g. here in The Netherlands, many bookshops would cary SUSE Linux boxes.

In Norway as well, at least in academia - I remember seeing SUSE boxes in the bookstores at both the Norwegian University of Technology and Science and the University of Bergen - this would have been in 1996-1998 or so.

I thought it was spawned off Red Hat. What is the story behind Suse's use of RPM?

Redhat open sourced rpm. SuSE adopted it because they saw the benefits.

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