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Not only is Linux the amazingly versatile system which has become the server of choice for webmasters everywhere, it's also the system with the most fascinating history and culture. It really has its own personality, as these little bites of trivia will show you.
The penguin mascot of Linux is named "Tux". Linux creator Linus Torvalds was inspired to use a penguin for his operating system's mascot after a visit to Canberra, Australia led to an encounter with a fairy-penguin, which playfully nipped him. He later explained his choice: "Some people have told me they don't think a fat penguin really embodies the grace of Linux, which just tells me they have never seen a angry penguin charging at them in excess of 100mph."
Currently, the world's fastest computer is IBM's Roadrunner supercomputer at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, USA. It cost $133 million USD and has a peak performance of 1.7 petaflops. And of course, it runs Linux!
The first commercially-produced live-CD distribution of Linux was Yggdrasil, announced in 1992 and released until 1995, when it was overtaken by newer distributions. The name the World Tree of Norse mythology, and was meant to signify the way the project has assembled itself out of the group efforts of developers the world over.
Not only does Google run it's world-class web business on Linux, but it helps build Linux as well. An estimated 1.1% of the code in the Linux kernel was put in by developers employed by Google, incorporated. Other companies which contribute code to the Linux operating system include IBM, Novell, Red Hat, and Oracle.
Oracle being a company headed by Lawrence Ellison, the 11th richest billionaire in the world, and yet contributing to the open source Linux, put aside the old misconception that Linux was built by amateur volunteers in their spare time. Oracle set the world's benchmark performance record in 2004 for Oracle(r) Database 10g running on Linux-based SMPs, so it's obvious that Linux and Oracle benefit each other.
Speaking of world's records, Mozilla Firefox, the number-one open source web browser on Linux systems, also set a Guinness world record for most downloads in a 24-hour period, with 8,002,530 downloads of the 3.0 version of Firefox released in 2008.
Linux and the GNU software that runs on it has a unique quality of flexibility not found in any other software, due to the liberal GPL license. This has allowed for some incredible oddities in Linux distributions. Amongst the more unusual niche Linux distributions are:
Tom's Root-Boot floppy - which fits on one 1.4 MB disk.
Puppy Linux - a 60MB live CD which runs from RAM so the CD can even be removed once it's running.
Hikarunix - a distribution which is devoted entirely to the Asian board game of Go.
VoltaLinux - which is a combination of Slackware Linux and BSD.
Linux From Scratch - which is nothing but a "cookbook" with step-by-step instructions on how to download, compile, and set up a complete Linux system one piece at a time. For learning purposes only!
Slackware - the oldest surviving Linux distribution, which is based on the concept of being a self-service distro where you do more of the work yourself and has Dr. "Bob" Dobbs, the character from the parody religion "Church of the SubGenius" as its mascot.
Poseidon Linux - a distribution designed specifically for academic and scientific use, including tools for high mathematics, 2D/3D/4D visualization, and GIS/maps.
When Linux creator Linus Torvalds was upgrading the computer at the University of Helsinki, he eventually came up to an assistant and asked "How do you power-off this machine?" He'd been working on it for three months, and had managed to keep it running continuously the whole time while upgrading it.
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