Linux penguin

Tux is the official mascot of Linux. Tux, created by Larry Ewing in 1996, is a chubby penguin that looks content and satiated. The concept of the Linux mascot being a penguin came from Linus Torvalds, the creator of the Linux kernel.

It is sometimes claimed that the name was derived from Torvalds UniX, a name suggested by James Hughes, rather than the explanation that penguins look vaguely as if they are wearing a tuxedo.

Tux was designed for a Linux logo contest. Pictures of some of the other contestants can be found at . The winning logo was created by Larry Ewing using the GIMP (a free software graphics package) and 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.

According to Little Penguin on a visit to Canberra. Torvalds was looking for something fun and sympathetic to associate with Linux, and a slightly fat penguin sitting down after having had a great meal perfectly fit the bill.

Tux has become an icon for the Linux and Open Source community, with one British Linux user group adopting a penguin at Bristol Zoo. He is much more famous than his big friend, GNU, a peaceful and shy gnu that represents the GNU Project.

He is often dressed or portrayed differently, depending on context; for example, when representing the PaX security algorithm, he wears a helmet and brandishes an axe and shield, and his eyes are red.

Tux is the star of a Linux game called Tux Racer, in which the user guides Tux down a variety of different icy hills on his belly, trying to catch herring and beat the time limit.

In some Linux distributions, Tux greets the user during booting, with multi-processor systems displaying multiple tuxes.

TUX is also the name of Linux kernel-based web server, which is able to serve static web pages much faster than traditional servers like Apache HTTP Server. This piece of software is maintained by Red Hat .