Just curious as to know the significance of Penguin as the Linux logo. It just struck me when I saw those 'friendly' penguins on the Madrake web site when I was browsing for some information.... Does anyone know of the reason?

linus torvalds likes penguins

Heres a good one for you. A friend at work once asked me the same questions. He didn't like my answer so he made up his own. Here the e-mail he sent me.....After thinking about the story you told me the following is along the lines of what I thought or hoped the penguin may have come from.
The inventor we'll call him Mr. X was out late one night on a cough syrup binge at the local disco when someone slipped something in his drink that produced hallucinogenic effects. It was during this period that all choices made for the rest of the night were to be run by the penguin who started to appear after the tainting of the drink. Now this penguin may have looked cute but in actuality he was a real son of a bitch and refused Mr. X. all drink orders except for the consumption of fu-fu or "girl-drinks." This bothered the man to no end as he had prided himself on his iron gut as he called it. Well it was around the time of the man's 8th cosmopolitan that the penguin was talking to someone he had met but it was all in binary code, the man knew this because he was seeing it. After the novelty wore off the man grew quite suspicious and started to compile and assemble this and found that the penguin was trying to pick up the bartender by giving her the code for this odd OS. The man grabbed the penguin in a fit of rage and started to yell at him. The penguin turned around and was laughing at the man. The man asked what was he telling the women a second ago? The penguin began to speak but the man grew very tired and lost the strength in his knees as he began to fell but as he did so he thought the penguin was saying Linux. As the man lay there knocked out the penguin was still talking to him explaining that it was his new program called windex which was an add-on to the windows platform. When the man came to some time later he awoke and had the idea about Linux and vowed to create it and exploit the penguin as much as he could for the bad night that the penguin caused the man.
This might have been better to tell me

then Larry Ewing designed the de facto "standard" penguin using the gimp.

see this link for a little more info

http://www.isc.tamu.edu/~lewing/linux/

Go to this link for the actual history of how the penguin came to be. http://wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,42209,00.html

Hmmm....doesn't seem to pick up the whole link, just add the numbers after that comma from that link and it should take you there.

--Fixed the link for you. That problem will be corrected -- *jeremy

Cool! Thatz a good link.