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Having a discussion at work with a colleague, and he is claiming graphical installers for *nix environments have only been available for the last few years, but I can't find any solid information on the topic, so I thought I'd ask.

References would be appreciated, but recalling from memory will do for any of you who have been using Linux for years.

Update : Apologies, not installers for Linux, but installers for apps inside of Linux.

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  • define graphical... the curses based installers are still considered "graphical" but I'm guessing you are referring to the X11/GNOME based installer
    – h3rrmiller
    Jan 16, 2013 at 16:42
  • The first Linux distro I used was Fedora core 2, which had anaconda, a graphical installer. Anaconda has been around for a long time, but I am pretty sure the GUI front-end is a later edition (vs the curses front-end).
    – jordanm
    Jan 16, 2013 at 16:43
  • yes please h3rrmiller, I'm thinking something that perhaps lets you use a mouse to point and click.
    – Ninjanoel
    Jan 16, 2013 at 16:43
  • jordanm, how many years ago?
    – Ninjanoel
    Jan 16, 2013 at 16:44
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    The synaptic package manager was released in 2001 according to wikipeida.
    – jordanm
    Jan 16, 2013 at 17:01

3 Answers 3

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AIX has had SMIT for a long time (along with the command line version smitty)

HP-UX used to have SAM (long deprecated), introduced in 1992, which ran installs through their posix-standardized installation tools. (swinstall, swlist, swcopy, etc..). In addition to the command line, SAM would run them in a gui.

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  • I believe this question was specific to Linux.
    – jordanm
    Jan 16, 2013 at 18:02
  • Except the original question said "unix environments"
    – Tim B
    Jan 16, 2013 at 18:09
  • You are right, the question does say "*nix", while the title explicitly says "linux".
    – jordanm
    Jan 16, 2013 at 18:18
  • fair enough. I read one more carefully than the other.
    – Tim B
    Jan 16, 2013 at 18:30
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The synaptic package manager has always been a graphic GTK-based front end for package management. This has existed since November 13, 2001 according to wikipedia. It is likely that this is not the first graphical package manager front-end, but it proves that graphical package managers go back further than "a few years".

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    I was fooling around with Red Hat 6.2 lately, and it had a graphical installer already (probaly since a few versions before). Red Hat 6.0 is 1999.
    – vonbrand
    Jan 21, 2013 at 19:57
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I remember installing Mandrake 8.0 (now Mandriva) in late August in 2001. The app installer was graphical. I remember it looking more Qt than gtk-based.

According to DistroWatch, Mandrake had graphical installer (both for OS and app) since 7.0, around January 2000

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