Funny Side of Linux
In all seriousness of being a linux user we sometimes forget the fun side of it all, here is an attempt to capture some of it.
A history lesson
Who would think that Linus Torvalds, creator of Linux, himself never thought much about linux being so famous and powerful and in its current form as it is now? Linus, in his famous message at comp.os.minix wrote in August 26 1991:
PS. Yes - it’s free of any minix code, and it has a multi-threaded fs.
It is NOT protable (uses 386 task switching etc), and it probably never
will support anything other than AT-harddisks, as that’s all I have :-(.
You can read his whole message and the rest of the thread here. This single message, albeit funny now, started an OS revolution that resulted in more than 100 “notable” linux distro and millions of user-base, both in personal life and corporate environment, in many languages all over the world for free.
A lesson in humility.
Funny stderr
Shells often gives out error messages when it doesn’t agree with your command input. Though its not exclusive for linux systems, its nevertheless funny and worth a mention. Here are some examples of stderr in linux system, I am sure some of you might have already seen these before. If you know some funny stderr, do share. Look at the shell prompt to take a hint on what shell is being used for the examples.
Easter Eggs
Easter Eggs in a computer world are hidden jokes/pranks, “features” that only happen when certain conditions are met, and often not documented. Linux has a culture of its own when it comes to Easter Eggs. (some of these are not exclusive to linux).
The infamous apt-get moo
Get the meaning of life from gvim by typing “:help 42” in command mode, a reference to “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy”.
(click for larger image)
Inside a gnome desktop press alt+f2, than on the run application window type in “free the fish“, and watch the fish swim all around your screen.
There are many many easter eggs, can’t list them all here. To get a much wider list of easter eggs, check out: http://www.eeggs.com/tree/1134.html
Funny Comics
Here are some funny comics I like that makes a reference to linux (again not exclusively).
Oh Crap, hacker! I would like to credit this picture to its author but unfortunately I forgot where I got it from.
(click for larger image)
And ofcourse, xkcd comics.
Command line fu:
Linux user at best buy:
Enormously famous, make me a sandwich:
Angry Frustrated Coder
Coding can be frustrating, fixing a stubborn bug even more so. Sometime coders leaves their frustration marks all over source codes as comments. You can search for them by typing this on the terminal:
grep -R <explicit_word> /usr/src/linux/*
(click for larger image)
I hope you found some of these funny sides of Linux amusing.
If you liked this article, please share it on del.icio.us, StumbleUpon or Digg. I’d appreciate it. :)
Loading ...
Nice stuff!
There’s another good collection here…
http://tinyurl.com/6h3h5x
(preview: http://preview.tinyurl.com/6h3h5x)
–Ace–
What’s really funny about Linux is how Vista SP1 is dominating it’s ass. It’s Brutal!
Vista SP1 dominates Linux’s ass.
A lot of this was new to me.. nice post! I think I’m gonna go Easter Egg hunting on Ubuntu :)
I have sworn not to use Linux again until I can change color depth without having to edit a text file and reboot.
Never needed to change color depth in linux…
@David T. Maybe 10-12 years ago it was needed. But I never had to do that. If you haven’t tried it recently, I suffest you do and you will see a world of diferance from the time you have used it.
“I would like to credit this picture to it’s author but unfortunately I forgot where I got it from.”
Bigger than cheese
http://www.biggercheese.com
“What’s really funny about Linux is how Vista SP1 is dominating it’s ass. It’s Brutal”
Is Vista SP1 an OS already? I didn’t know that.
“A culture of ITS own”. No apostrophe. Honestly, with the increase in armchair journalism due to blogging comes a decrease in quality.
Cue the grammar nazi comments, but doing it properly just makes you look more professional.
Vista doesnt own Linux. If you believe that then your fucked up. Vista is a piece of shit. You even know that, but you like paying for your shitware,
Can you do me a favor and correct all the “it’s” in your article to “its”? Much appreciated.
Haha, nice post and nice images. For everyones attention, the first image is a cut/paste of Quakeulf’s “rei”-image, which you can see here: http://quakeulf.suxos.org/images/index.php?album=sketchwork&image=reinyoon.png
@Davide Andrea.
I corrected all the “it’s”, let me know if I goofed anywhere else. However, I left out the “it’s” on the qoute made by Linus Torvalds himself. Because that is an original qoute, and it wouldn’t be nice of me to correct him.
Thanks.
Linux TOTALLY rocks! Period! Any questions?
http://www.FireMe.To/udi
Quote from “Sam & Max Season 1: Ice Station Santa” when the player tries to use a computer with apparently a terminal open: Sam: “In hell, all computers run on Linux”. Also in some part: “I cannot use that, it’s Linux”.
You forgot;
Noia@Phobos:~$ %blow
-bash: fg: %blow: no such job
Windows is still the main system for me. But I relied on Linux just as much now.
What, no mention of ddate?
What about … ?:
zecc@zecc:~$ make love
make: *** No rule to make target `love’. Stop.
ZOMG TEH REI!!!!!!
Sweet Blog!
Nice post on my LOVE Linux :)
Heh, thats great. i knew about the apt-get, but not aptitude. Also, I wouldn’t have posted, but this will make post number 42.
Teehee. Go Super Powers!