Tux

An Evening of Culture

and       Doug Waud         too!

WLUG  August 22 2002

Ode to Linux


In a corner of the Finland

In that great reindeer abode,

Dwelt a hacker, code contractor,

And his offspring, kernel code.


Drove he Redmond to distraction.

They could not his mindset see.

He ignored their business practice

Gave his darling out for free!


Oh my darling, Oh my darling

Oh my darling Linux box

Once you start, you go forever,

Quite immune to Redmond pox


Linus Torvalds, Richard Stallman.

Both scan perfectly you see,

Contrast this with William Gates-san

That one's awkward as can be!


How I miss you. How I miss you.

Windows dear, I'm quite beref'.

Thou art lost and gone forever

And your damn blue screen of death!


In a corner of the hard drive

Sits an OS quite unused

I enjoy my newfound freedom

Redmond crap isnow refused.


If you catch me using Windows

Since you know where that stuff heads

Now's your chance to do a favor

Please be sure to up my meds!


Feel the urge to go to Windows

Watch your friends go "Holy cow!"

It is clear that you are going

Over to the dark side now.


Microsoft ads catch your fancy?

Feel the need to money pay?

Yoda has these words to give you

Um, the farce be with you may!


Contrast Linux now with windows

(View the latter from afar!)

Yes I do find quite a difference

Twixt cathedral and bizarre!


Odd behavior, once a mystery

Things I never understood

Now appear to me quite clearly

I can see beneath the hood!


Switch to Linux. Break the shackles.

Save a bundle. Take a bow!

Here's advice that Spock will give you

Go live free and prosper now.


But where's Word, Excel and Access?

Can we get an "Office Suite"?

Not to worry, Open Office

Or StarOffice join the fleet.


Got a program runs in Windows

Full reboot you can decline

Want your solitaire or freecell

You can serve it up with WINE!


Using Linux problems vanish

All is simple to the max

That's the case without exception

Unless you chose to count EMACS!


We have Mandrake, SuSE, Corel

Debian and old RedHat

Yellow Dog and one called Slackware

That's what Linus hath begat!


On top of Linux rides the body

Of the stuff we call GNU

Gnice compilers, and debuggers

And gnother toys for you.


Out of Cambridge, sired by Stallman

Comes the mighty GPL

We can wallow here in freedom

Code that's hidden, go to hell!


Who's the boss here? Who's the leader?

Well the answer is quite droll.

Redmond now it seems quite clearly

Has completely lost control!


GNU's not Unix, GNU's not Unix

Thus it will forever go

It's a version of recursion

Damn it -- buffer overflow!


We have Torvalds and there's Stallman

To these two we add a third

When we think of open software

Don  Knuth can join the herd!


TEX and Linux go together

And to that we add GNU

So on top of all these goodies

We get "pretty printing" too!


Microsoft sells code defective

And they never get it tight

But when you look at our Apache

"Patchy" code comes out all right !


System hangs up? Got a bug there?

Let me make it mighty clear

Microsoft dot com will tell you

"We call that a 'feature' here!"


Look at Apple OS ten now

Based on Unix. See the light?

But they missed the proper flavor

P'rhaps next time they'll get it right.


Kernel hacking, source compiling

Yield the "highs" that we all seek.

Code revising and debugging

Entertainment for the geek!


cat /proc/net/dev, ifconfig

MAC address and route dash n

All these tools and many more

Are just toys in our play pen.


We have tar dash xzvf

Or we have our rpm

No matter which, it's clearly certain

We can package files with them.


Andy Stewart and the Boynton

Cutting pizza with a knife

Here we all are quite contented

There's no need to "get a life"!


Oh my god! He'll go forever.

What can we do to stop this Doug?

Now we see his lifely function:

Need someone to pull the plug!


If you think my simple stanzas

Are not quite state-of-the-art

You can only blame yourselves here

You should not have let me start!


End of Cultural Soiree




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doug waud 2002-09-02