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”.

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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.

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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/*

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I hope you found some of these funny sides of Linux amusing.

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