An Evening of Culture
and Doug Waud too!
WLUG August 22 2002
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!
This document was generated using the LaTeX2HTML translator Version 99.2beta8 (1.43)
Copyright © 1993, 1994, 1995, 1996,
Nikos Drakos,
Computer Based Learning Unit, University of Leeds.
Copyright © 1997, 1998, 1999,
Ross Moore,
Mathematics Department, Macquarie University, Sydney.
The command line arguments were:
latex2html -no_subdir -split 0 -show_section_numbers /tmp/lyx_tmpdir14778jyJ9to/lyx_tmpbuf14778ghbgWx/odetolinux.tex
The translation was initiated and tweaked extensively by Doug Waud