Blog 12

Okay, we are on the home stretch. Let's have fun this week. Find out or make up a story where linux came up with the penguin as it's "mascot". Even though this is fun, make it worthy of 10 points....I will be grading accordingly.


The year is 2002. There once was this little penguin who lived in the Antarctic. His Mother left to find food and Dad was to take care of him. Well, the little penguin was very naughty and decided to run away from the pack. The little penguin walked and walked until he came to a little village of Eskimos. The little penguin decided that he did not like the cold, so he found his way into a little igloo. It was very warm and toasty in the igloo. Soon, he heard people coming. So he slithered into a backpack on the floor. As it was, a young boy was going off to college in Portland OR. The little boy left his igloo with his backpack and books. The little boy landed in Portland and decided that he needed a drink as the big city was over whelming. So as the little boy got drunk, the little penguin escaped from the backpack. The little penguin walked out of the airport to a nearby park. He was liking the weather so far and decided to take a little nap on a park bench. A man, by the name of Linus Torvalds, was walking by and saw the little penguin. Linus asked if the little penguin needed a place to stay since he was not married and was super rich and could give the little penguin everything he needed. The little penguin waddled to Linus's house and there was a beautiful house and as it happened to be, a wonderful penguin pool. As they were sitting there, the little penguin, had to poop, so he walked over to the Tuxedo that Linus just bought and pooped right on it. Linus decided to call him Tux... The end!!

Here is the real boring story taken from Wiki: "The concept of the Linux mascot being a penguin came from Linus Torvalds, the creator of Linux. Tux was created by Larry Ewing in 1996 after an initial suggestion made by Alan Cox [2] and further refined by Linus Torvalds on the Linux kernel mailing list.[3] Linus took his inspiration from a photograph[4] he found on an FTP site,[5] showing a penguin figurine looking strangely like the Creature Comforts characters made by Nick Park. The first person to call the penguin "Tux" was James Hughes, who said that it stood for "(T)orvalds (U)ni(X)".[6] However, many people observe that Tux is also an abbreviation of tuxedo, the outfit which springs to mind when they see a penguin.

Tux was originally designed as a submission for a Linux logo contest. Three such competitions took place; Tux won none of them. This is why Tux is formally known as the Linux mascot and not the logo.[7] Tux was created[8] by Larry Ewing using the first publicly released[9] version (0.54) of GIMP, a free software graphics package. It was released by him under the following condition:

Permission to use and/or modify this image is granted provided you acknowledge me lewing@isc.tamu.edu and The GIMP if someone asks.[10]"(I WANT THIS AS MY TATOO!!!)