Last year, I blogged about 35 Distros and how they got their names. Some of the distros out there have fascinating stories, while others are just too mundane. However make sure you read that blog, its a very interesting one (trust me).

The natural extension of the “Etymology of a Distro” blog would be delving deeper into Open Source project’s etymologies. Indeed many readers already suggested that. Sadly I got sidetracked and put the whole idea on the back burner. Now I have put it off for way too long, here are 20 Open Source applications and the interesting (and not so interesting) stories behind their names:

1-GNOME

The popular desktop environment originally stood for GNU Network Object Model Environment. The acronym was proposed by Elliot Lee, one of the authors of ORBit and the Object Activation Framework. It refers to GNOME’s original intention of creating a distributed object framework similar to Microsoft’s OLE. This no longer reflects the core vision of the GNOME project and some members of the project advocate dropping the acronym and re-naming “GNOME” to “Gnome”.

2-KDE

The name KDE was intended as a word play on the existing Common Desktop Environment, available for Unix systems. The K was originally suggested to stand for “Kool”, but it was quickly decided that the K should stand for nothing in particular. Additionally, one of the tips in certain versions of KDE 3 incorrectly states that the K currently is just meant to be the letter before L in the Latin alphabet, the first letter in the word Linux.

3-Pidgin

Pidgin used to be called Gaim, but after a prolonged naming dispute with AOL’s AIM, it was changed to Pidgin. The word “pidgin” refers to the language that develops between two people who do not share a common language . The word itself is traced back to “pigeon” the bird because it can be used as a messenger.

4-Amarok

My favorite music player, and perhaps one of the few pieces of software that I can truly say “I love”. Amarok was originally named after Mike Oldfield‘s album Amarok. This fact has been included as an easter egg I blogged about some time ago.

5-XBMC

XBMC is a media center that was originally developed for the original XBOX. XBMC is an acronym for XBox Media Center. However the project evolved and became a media center for Linux, Apple TV, Windows, and Mac OS; but the nomenclature stuck.

6-Konqueror

Konqueror is a web browser/file manager designed as a core part of KDE. “Konqueror” is a reference to the two primary competitors at the time of the browser’s first release: “first comes the Navigator, then Explorer, and then the Konqueror”. It also follows the KDE naming convention: the names of most KDE programs begin with the letter K.

7-Gimp

GIMP originally stood for General Image Manipulation Program. However in 1997 it became part of the GNU project so it changed to GNU Image Manipulation Program

8-Gwenview

The word “Gwen” means “white” in the Breton language and is commonly used as a first name (Gwen Stefani is as white as they come )

9-Kopete

Kopete originally comes from the Chilean word “copete” which means alcoholic drink. The “C” was substituted with a” K” to follow the KDE naming convention. What does a chatting program has to do with alcohol? Your guess is as good as mine!

10-K3B

According to wikipedia , K3B means: K Burn Baby Burn, however their reference link serves a 404 error. So am not sure how true this is, but if true, then K3B would be one on of my favorite etymologies. Maybe with KDE4 now, it should be renamed to K4B, Burn Bloody Burn Baby

11-Kate

Kate is an acronym for KDE Advance Text Editor.

12-Apache

There are two explanations behind the naming. The first explanation is that Apache was chosen out of respect for the Native American tribe of Apache, well-known for their endurance and their skills in warfare.

In order to understand the second explanation, you need to understand Apache’s history. The first version of the Apache web server was created by Robert McCool known simply as NCSA HTTPd. in 1994 Robert left the project leaving a variety of patches for improvements circulating through e-mails. Once these patches were applied, it became a “A PAtCHy server”

Officially, Apache now sticks with the first story.

13-Joomla

Joomla is the English spelling of the Arabic  word jumla meaning “all together” or “as a whole”, as well as “sentence” (as in, phrase)

14-Drupal

Drupal is an English rendering of the Dutch word “druppel”, which means “drop” (as in “a water droplet”). The choice of  “drop” was merely coincidental, Dries Buytaert the original writer wanted to register dorp.org (meaning “village” in Dutch, in reference to his program’s community aspect) Dries made a typo when checking the domain name and thought it sounded better.

15-Krita

A Readme accompanying Krita’s source code states:

Krita is a paint application for raster images. It's also, according to
the Dictionary of Phrase and Fable:

The first of four Hindu periods contained in the great Yuga, when the
genius of Truth and Right, in the form of bull, stood firm on his four
feet, and man gained nothing by iniquity.

In the Mahabharata, the name 'krita' is used in a context where this
can be translated with 'perfect' - the perfect age.

Krita is Swedish for chalk and rita means "to draw".

16-Thunar

Thunar is named after the god of thunder in Norse mythology.

17-Liferea

This one is kind of deceptive, never guessed it was an acronym: Linux Feed Reader.

18-Azureus

Dendrobates azureus is the latin name for the blue dart frog. The co-creator was used to giving codenames of dart frog to his projects.

19-Cygwin

Cgywin started by Steve Chamberlain, a Cygnus engineer. He initially named it gnuwin32, but then changed it it to Cygwin32 to emphasise on his company’s role. When Microsoft registered the Win32 trademark, it was changed to Cygwin

20-Apt/Yum

Apt: Advanced Packaging Tool

Yum: Yellowdog Updater Modified

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Personally I settled with #14 (sunset). Which one did you settle with? What others do you recommend? Oh and ENJOY!

Click on the image to take you straight to the page.

1-Somatic

By: pokemonjojo2

2-Clear Crisp Morning

By: penseleit

3-Tux vs. MS

By:  alcapcom

4-Doe

By: xyzwqt

5-Blue Swirl

By: darkknight9

6-Magic Book

By: gHiRo

7-Pixel Girl

By: fabiand

8-Super GNOME Bros

By: linuxville

9-Sunshine

By: paullinux

10-Relaxing Water

By: cooper14

11-Still Alive Sunshine

By: savagehp

12-Soft Flower

By: solarfields

13-Avio

By: tobain

14-Sunset

By: Dav87

15-Arc Colors

By: perfectska04

16-Toxic

By: guerrerocarl

17-Clean

By: Simoo

18-Porum

By:linuzoid

18-Sweet Darkness

By: Snooky (distro logos can be changed)

19-WorldKDM

By: codicem

20-LoveKDE

By: invernomuto

21-Peace

By: nico67

22-Impressions

By: linuzoid

23-Skyline

By: Soravis

24-KdmLinux

By: Codicem

25-Earth Abstract

By: repli2dev

26-True Nature

By: Stanlus

27-KDM Retina

By: codicem

28-Xmas KDM

By: thio83

29-Flamenco Modern

By: twi

30-Deep

By: mPtTybOB

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The recently released GNOME 2.24 includes the latest builds of Metacity, so, unless you’ve been compiling from tarballs yourself to stay at the bleeding edge, GNOME 2.24 will be the first taste mainstream users will be getting of the latest Metacity developments. While Metacity itself has seen its fair share of tweaking, the compositor, written by Iain Holmes and Thomas Thurman, has received a great deal of attention, so perhaps it’s time to take a second look at it.

Metacity’s compositor can be enabled in GNOME by launching gconf-editor (alt-F2, type ‘gconf-editor’ and hit enter), then navigating to apps/metacity/general and setting the key ‘compositing_manager’ to true.

Changes

The biggest change I’ve noted since the compositor’s previous incarnation is that the whole thing just feels a lot snappier. On my laptop’s Radeon Xpress 200M chip, which is by no means a high-performance card, windows move around just as smoothly as Metacity without compositing, and scrolling in Firefox is smooth and responsive. It performed equally well with both the open source Radeon driver, and the proprietary fgrlx driver.

Smaller developments include tweaking of windows’ drop shadows; they are now a bit wider than before, and change depending on whether the window is in focus or not. In previous versions, windows would turn to black squares when they were in the process of minimizing, but they now have reverted back to the classic ‘black wireframe’ of vanilla Metacity; which is uglier in my opinion, but since it’s purely a cosmetic difference as opposed to a functional one, it doesn’t really bother me.

Aesthetics

Keeping in line with Metacity’s ‘boring’ description, the compositor is extremely light on effects; the only things of note are the drop shadows under windows and menus, and the inclusion of window thumbnails when alt-tabbing. The thumbnails aren’t updated in real time a la Compiz Fusion, but they are an improvement from simple icons.

One thing to note, is that Metacity’s compositing is based on Xrender instead of OpenGL, which is lighter on resources and better from a compatibility perspective, but you shouldn’t ever expect to be getting cover-switching or getting ‘the cube’ which Compiz and Beryl became famous for. However, it is lightweight and it may just be what you need if you’re after running programs that rely on compositing, such as Avant Window Navigator.

My only real complaint is that, much like Metacity itself, the compositor is extremely sparse on configuration options. In fact, outside of forcing some certain changes with Xorg.conf, the compositor only appears to have two options; on and off. The defaults are fine, but there is zero room for tweaking unless you’re compiling it yourself. In addition to that, enabling it via gconf-editor is not exactly the most user-friendly way of going about things, though perhaps this is a complaint that is better levelled at the GNOME developers.

The Bottom Line

In its current incarnation, the compositing in Metacity is similar in feel and function to the compositing used in Xfce; it’s not particularly attractive looking, but it is extremely stable and performs well on lower-end systems. If you’re after features that only compositing can provide but aren’t after Compiz’ ultra-pretty but ultra-heavy management, you may have tried Metacity’s compositing already and been disappointed. However, the new version has dramatically stepped up on stability and performance, so once you’ve got your hands on GNOME 2.24 you may want to consider giving it another chance.

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Amarok

I have previously blogged about this, basically if you change the tag title of a song to “Amarok” and the artist’s tag to “Mike Oldfield”, a pop-up OSD will appear saying:

One of Mike Oldfields best pieces of work, Amarok inspired the name behind the audio-player you are currently using. Thanks for choosing Amarok!

Mark Kretschmann
Max Howell
Chris Muehlhaeuser
The many other people who have helped make Amarok what it is

Super Cow to the Rescue!

This easter egg is very well known, but it absolutely needs a mention, after all apt-get is one super package manager that helped us through a lot of difficult nights. This egg is so popular that someone filed a bug complaining that Ubuntu’s Super Cow doesn’t look like a cow, Gentoo’s cow is much better.
apt-get moo

You should get the following ASCII drawing:

If I Give You an Easter Egg, Will You Go Away?

The successor of Apt-get, Aptitude, claims that it doesn’t have this easter egg. But did you give up so easily?! Linux users don’t give up damn it! Try the verbose flag, multiple times!

Lulz! A snake eating an elephant! Thats one big ass snake over there!

Curse Words in The Linux Source Code

grep -r fuck /usr/src/linux[TAB]/*

This command is different from system to system, basically when you get to “linux” press tab to see the different source codes you have. Try different words, fuck, damn, shit…use your imagination. What interesting results could you unearth?

Here is the output of “fuck” on a one kernel of mine:

Wanda!

In GNOME press alt-f2 and then type “free the fish”. Wanda the fish will start swimming around on your desktop! Unfortunately Wanda has been swimming around my desktop for two days now, haven’t gotten around figuring out how drown it (I know I can be sometimes cruel.)

A Jolly Bunch Of Geeks!

Open OpenOffice Writer, then type “‘StarWriterTeam” (without the quotes obviously) and then hit F3. I tried this on Ubuntu, not sure if it works on the Windows or Mac versions, they probably do though.

Also, you could open up Calc and type in any cell “=STARCALCTEAM()”. You’ll get the team behind Calc kicking back and having some beers in (Hawaii?)

That Ain’t A Pretty Place! Trust Me

You will need to install first a silly program called cowsay. Which lets you use the apt-get cow to say stuff in ASCII comic style:

sudo apt-get install cowsay

Now type:

cowsay -f head-in.cow ouch

Book Of Mozilla

This is one of the funniest and greatest easter eggs EVER! In almost all versions of Firefox and even Netscape before that, if you type “about:mozilla” you will get a quote in biblical style! These quotes are actually references to important dates in the history of Netscape and Mozilla. There are 5 official quotes from Mozilla, and an additional intriguing quote in Flock. But there are numerous unofficial versions lying around in the corners of the Internet.

The Book of Mozilla, 12:10

This verse can be found in the first version of Netscape 1.0. According to Wikipedia, this relevation means:

The “beast” is a metaphor for Netscape. The punishments threatened towards the “unbelievers” (most likely users who didn’t conform to standards) are traditionally biblical but with the strange threat that their “tags shall blink until the end of days”. This is a reference the feature in early version of Netscape to blink bad tags, as seen in the source code comments from the Book of Mozilla.

Book of Mozilla, 3:31

This verse first appeared in May 1998 until October 1998. Then the verse was lost because Netscape was rewritten when it was released as open source. The verse emerged again in 2000. According to Wikipedia this verse means:

Again, the “beast” is Netscape. The text probably refers to Netscape’s hope that, by opening its source, they could attract a “legion” of developers all across the world, who would help improve the software (with the “din of a million keyboards”). “Mammon” refers to Microsoft, whose Internet Explorer browser was Netscape’s chief competition.

Book of Mozilla 7:15

This first appeared in Firefox 1.5 and above, in addition to other browsers such as Camino and Epiphany. This is what Wikipedia had to say about the verse:

The “beast” falling refers to Netscape being closed down by its now parent company AOL. The “great bird” that rises from the ash is the Mozilla Foundation, which was established to continue Mozilla development. The bird rises from the ash like a phoenix

Book of Mozilla 8:20

This one first appeared in Netscape 9.0 beta, Wikipedia’s interpretation:

The “Creator” refers to Netscape the company. There are two interpretations of the verse: the phrase “beast reborn” appears in the previous verse referring to the Mozilla Foundation and “it was good” could be a tribute to everyone who contributed to the Mozilla project. “Beast reborn” could also be a reference to Netscape reopening their browser division instead of outsourcing development; Netscape Browser 8 was produced by Mercurial Communications.

Book of Mozilla 11:1

This first appeared in the Flock social browser which is based on Firefox, according to Wikipedia:

“And when the beast had taken the quarter of the earth under its rule…” is probably a reference to the increasing market share Firefox was gaining over the more popular Internet Explorer. “Birds of Sulfur” references the developmental codename of Flock, which is Sulfur. The “mountain views” references the city of Mountain View, California where the company that produces Flock is based. As this verse is new (version 1.0 was released 5 November 2007), much of the meaning is still unclear, though “they took their pens and dared to create” most likely references to the fact of a lot of blogging, and social networking integration to Flock.

Book of Mozilla 11:9

Mammon slept. And the beast reborn spread over the earth and its numbers grew legion. And they proclaimed the times and sacrificed crops unto the fire, with the cunning of foxes. And they built a new world in their own image as promised by the sacred words, and spoke of the beast with their children. Mammon awoke, and lo! it was naught but a follower.

from The Book of Mozilla,11:9

(10th Edition)

This one is the final verse (so far) in the Book of Mozilla, it appeared first in Firefox 3 Beta. The meaning behind this is very clear to anyone who is to speed in the browser wars, but Wikipedia’s interpretation:

“Mammon” is again Internet Explorer, which “slept” for the 5 years between releases. The “beast reborn” refers to Firefox, which gained supporters who self-organized through Spread Firefox, and undertook publicity for the browser, taking out an advertisement in The New York Times and making a crop circle shaped like the Firefox logo. The “cunning of foxes” is a direct reference to Firefox’s name. The “new world” refers to modern, standards based dynamic websites and open source applications. The latter half of the passage links to the Mozilla Manifesto and the about:Mozilla newsletter, and describes Internet Explorer as a follower.

Wanda Doubles as a Missile Shooting UFO!

In GNOME press alt+f2 and type “gegls from outer space” This will launch a Space Invader-esque game where GEGLs (stands for Genetically Engineered Goat Large) are trying to kill our beloved fish Wanda! Oh Noes!!!

Sudoku in KDE!

I have given so much to the GNOME desktop, I think I should give some love to it’s compeitor KDE. While I can’t vouch for this, as I don’t use KDE, but it is interesting. According to the KDE developer Jarslow Staniek’s blog, Open up Kexi and create a new table called Sudoku. You will get a little nice game of Sudoku!

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