I don’t care what Linus Torvalds says, Tux needs to lose a little bit of weight!

In case you’re wondering where the original idea for a penguin came from, here’s a letter from the original Linux Kernel mailing list posted by Linus Torvalds explaining why he chose a penguin as the Linux mascot and not some unfriendly macho beast like creature:

Re: Linux Logo prototype.

Linus Torvalds (torvalds@cs.helsinki.fi)

Thu, 9 May 1996 17:48:56 +0300 (EET DST)

.
Somebody had a logo competition announcement, maybe people can send their
ideas to a web-site..
.
Anyway, this one looks like the poor penguin is not really strong enough to
hold up the world, and it's going to get squashed. Not a good, positive logo,
in that respect..
.
Now, when you think about penguins, first take a deep calming breath, and
then think "cuddly". Take another breath, and think "cute". Go back to
"cuddly" for a while (and go on breathing), then think "contented".
.
With me so far? Good..
.
Now, with penguins, (cuddly such), "contented" means it has either just
gotten laid, or it's stuffed on herring. Take it from me, I'm an expert on
penguins, those are really the only two options.
.
Now, working on that angle, we don't really want to be associated with a
randy penguin (well, we do, but it's not politic, so we won't), so we
should be looking at the "stuffed to its brim with herring" angle here.
.
So when you think "penguin", you should be imagining a slighly overweight
penguin (*), sitting down after having gorged itself, and having just burped.
It's sitting there with a beatific smile - the world is a good place to be
when you have just eaten a few gallons of raw fish and you can feel another
"burp" coming.
.
(*) Not FAT, 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.
.
Now, if you have problems associating yourself with something that gets
off by eating raw fish, think "chocolate" or something, but you get the
idea.
.
Ok, so we should be thinking of a lovable, cuddly, stuffed penguin
sitting down after having gorged itself on herring. Still with me?
.
NOW comes the hard part. With this image firmly etched on your eyeballs, you
then scetch a stylizied version of it. Not a lot of detail - just a black
brush-type outline (you know the effect you get with a brush where the
thickness of the line varies). THAT requires talent. Give people the
outline, and they should say [ sickly sweet voice, babytalk almost ]"Ooh,
what a cuddly penguin, I bet he is just _stuffed_ with herring", and small
children will jump up and down and scream "mommy mommy, can I have one too?".
.
Then we can do a larger version with some more detail (maybe leaning
against a globe of the world, but I don't think we really want to give
any "macho penguin" image here about Atlas or anything). That more
detailed version can spank billy-boy to tears for all I care, or play
ice-hockey with the FreeBSD demon. But the simple, single penguin would
be the logo, and the others would just be that cuddly penguin being used
as an actor in some tableau.
.
Linus

The explanation for the name TUX can also be found in the mailing list archive:

Re: Let's name the penguin! (was: Re: Linux 2.0 really _is_ released..)
.
James Hughes (jamesh@interpath.com)
Mon, 10 Jun 1996 20:25:52 -0400
.
(T)orvolds (U)ni(X) --> TUX!

Not everyone wants to be associated with an overweight penguin burping after a meal, no wonder a few of the more hardcore Linux distros chose to move away form the overweight penguin image (not saying SUSE is hardcore, but Novel always wants to do things differently anyway), I suggest they slowly slim down TUX until he looks like a little innocent penguin kid, instead of a bulky blob!

SUSE slightly broke the association by choosing an overweight chameleon:

FreeBSD chose the chubby devil:

Gentoo chose a chubby ‘g’ it seems:

Debian decided they had enough of chubby mascots!
They gave their logo design job to pre-school kids in order to keep the design open source:

Now that I drifted totally off topic, let’s get back on topic, how can TUX or SUSE reveal those 6 pack abs (or in the case of SUSE, the chameleon, maybe 3 pack abs?) Doing a thousand sit ups a day probably wont do anything about their situation, not convinced?

Take a look at Mark Pfeltz’s abs, he broke the world record for most sit ups in 59 hours, he did 45,005 situps, but you still can’t see any abs:

I tried to take him on obviously, but after an hour and just over 1000 sit ups, I figured that I’m wasting my time, think of how much work you can finish in 59 hours.

The point I’m trying to make is that great looking abs has nothing to do with the amount of sit ups you do and has everything to do with the amount of body fat in your body, instead of wasting 59 hours, Mark could’ve spend that time doing strength training to burn that layer of fat and maybe even some aerobic type workouts to burn more body fat. That’s just another reason why all of these magic ab machines you see on television, fail, they may make your abs rock hard, but they don’t do anything about the layer of fat covering it. In the case of TUX, he’ll need to change his diet a little bit, spend less time in front of the computer compiling Linux kernels and get some exercise to burn that body suit of his.

Tom Venuto wrote a fantastic article backed up by science on why body fat tends to sit around the waist with men and around the thighs with woman, take a look here!

You can’t out-train a lousy diet! Here’s my advice: TUX needs to understand that life is about more than eating fish all day long, SUSE can eat all the flies it wants, I don’t like flies, FreeBSD must release a couple of souls from their computers, he’s working too hard, gentoo needs to use some style sheets in order to shrink down that ‘g’ and for Debian it’s already too late! In general that means, cut back on calorie intake while increasing the amount of training you do (burn those calories) to create a calorie deficiency in your body. Once your body fat percentage starts to hit the single digits, you’ll start seeing those beautiful abs smiling at you! It’s that easy, yet that difficult!

Think I’ll leave the specifics of burning calories for another day . . .