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Aussie icon set to go global

The poster child of the Linux movement is set to be temporarily replaced by a cleverly disguised marsupial to raise awareness for the plight of Tasmanian devils.
Written by Chris Duckett, Contributor

Many moons ago, it seemed that the geek world stopped with every new Linux kernel release. Those days have long since passed and the most striking feature of the 2.6.29 release is the replacement of Tux the penguin with Tuz the Tasmanian devil.

750px-tuz-logo-svg.png

A tassie devil disguised as a penguin about to hit a boot screen near you.
(Tuz logo image by Andrew McGown and Josh Bush, CC3.0)

Born as the mascot for the 2009 instalment of linux.conf.au, Tuz was destined to go worldwide when Linux creator Linus Torvalds agreed that the 2.6.29 release should use the little guy as a replacement for the standard Tux image that appears during the start-up of Linux, in order to raise awareness about the plight facing the devil species.

There are many other changes in this release; once again though, they are mostly under-the-covers work.

Highlights include the use of graphic modesetting within the kernel, the inclusion of the Squashfs and Btrfs filesystems, and support for WiMax. Modesetting is currently only supported on the Intel driver and Btrfs is regarded as highly unstable due to ongoing development.

For most users these changes are unlikely to spur an upgrade, although there is sure to be a large contingent of Aussies wanting to see Tuz and hoping he lives on as an option in future releases.

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