– by Tina Gasperson –
Thank goodness Linus Torvalds isn’t like most guys I know. If he was, the Linux mascot would be a football or a pit bull or a bikini-clad cheerleader. Or all three, juxtaposed in some interesting fashion. But Linus is different, and he likes penguins, so we get Tux — that cute little bird whose likeness is synonymous with Linux. Here’s a Web site that gives us the complete history of Tux.Our favorite penguin friend is only 5 years old, and was born as the result of a discussion back in 1996 on the linux-kernel mailing list about choosing an official logo and mascot for the new operating system, according to “A Complete History of Tux.” I’m betting they were probably pretty close to picking the Hooters girl as a mascot, when Linus chimed in and mentioned “a fondness for penguins.”

The site’s got a repost of Linus’ detailed specifications for the penguin mascot. “Not FAT,” he writes, “but you should be able to see that it’s sitting down because it’s really too stuffed to stand up. Think ‘bean bag’ here.” Cute and cuddly. Something that kids would want to take home.

Here, we can also find out why Linus likes penguins. (Supposedly he was bitten by one.) And another now-famous geek, Larry Ewing, is the one who created the perfect penguin, exactly to Linus’ specs, and sometime shortly thereafter the winsome creature was dubbed “Tux.” (Torvalds UniX, or something like that.)

No history site would be complete without a record of controversy, and here we find that not everyone wanted fun and fuzzy Tux to be the mascot for Linux. Maybe he’s just not business-like enough for the enterprise wannabes. Or maybe they just really wanted a football.

Keep scrolling, and you’ll get all the Tux trivia you ever wanted and more. If the Linux edition of Trival Pursuit comes out, you’ll have the Tux category nailed after a visit or two to Steve Baker’s “A Complete History of Tux.”

Kelly McNeill writes “Fans of the Be operating system let out a sigh of relief and a sigh of frustration after the up-and-down roller coaster that was Be, Inc. came to an official end. The end came with last Tuesday’s announcement by Be that its stockholders approved the sale of substantially all its intellectual property and other assets to a subsidiary of Palm. Although the sale of Be to Palm was met with enthusiasm by its investors, it could not have come at a more awkward time for the company, as the decision was confirmed only a couple days after Palm’s chief executive — Carl Yankowski — announced his resignation.”

CNet reports that “in her harshest attack yet, Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina blamed “lazy reporting” and Wall Street analysts who are too “focused on the short term” for many of the woes facing the computing giant.”

PC World reports that Transmeta is confident in spite of new competition from Intel and delays in its latest processor, according to CTO David Ditzel.

Bruce Schneier responds to Microsoft’s anti-disclosure movement in this week’s issue of Crypto-Gram (on Counterpane): “Culp [manager of the security response center at Microsoft] compares the practice of publishing vulnerabilities to shouting “Fire” in a crowded movie theater. What he forgets is that there actually is a fire; the vulnerabilities exist regardless.”

Linux PR has a press release announcing the creation of a German-speaking Linux portal.

Dave writes that Linux kernel 2.4.15-pre5 has been released. Read more for the changelog.
– Greg KH: enable hotplug driver support

– Andrea Arcangeli: remove bogus sanity check

– David Mosberger: /proc/cpuinfo and scsi scatter-gather for ia64

– David Hinds: 16-bit pcmcia network driver updates/cleanups

– Hugh Dickins: remove some stale code from VM

– David Miller: /proc/cpuinfo for sparc, sparc fork bug fix, network fixes, warning fixes

– Peter Braam: intermezzo update

– Greg KH: USB updates

– Ivan Kokshaysky: /proc/cpuinfo for alpha

– David Woodhouse: jffs2 – remove dead code, remove gcc3 warning

– Hugh Dickins: fix kiobuf page allocation/deallocation
Download:
http://www.kernel.org/mirrors”

Kelly McNeill writes “Fossil’s new wrist PDA may not allow you to frag your network-buddies in an all-night gaming session of Quake, but it will store important information like phone numbers, appointments, addresses and the like. It uses the same beaming technology found in most palmtop devices. The thing that makes this miniature PDA especially cool is that it looks not unlike a standard wristwatch. It seemed like a natural transition to me. Despite its small size, the average PDA isn’t as portable as a wristwatch, nor is it as easily accessible.”

Corel, according to CNet, announced new software titles for Mac OS X and pledged to bring all future Corel software to the operating system.

CNet reports: “A new crop of Linux handheld computers could soon satisfy the appetites of open-source software fans, with the long-awaited Yopy from GMate now on display at Comdex. Hewlett-Packard is also reported to be preparing a new Linux handheld.”