In a bid to help save Tasmanian Devils from extinction, Linus Torvalds decided to release the latest Linux kernel with the “Tuz” logo as the console image at the LCA 2009 conference. Tuz is a name perhaps derived from the popular Linux mascot Tux, plus Tasmanian Devil (Taz – as it was known as a Looney Toones cartoon character). So Tuz replaces Tux as the console boot image for the kernel release 2.6.29.
So 2.6.29 isn’t quite out yet, but I’ve merged the new Tuz logo, so now my laptop boots up with two of these guys showing. See an earlier post about the plush version of this that I got while in Hobart for LCA 2009.
– Linus Torvalds
In another news, GMail gets support for writing emails in Indian languages. The Google Transliteration technology had been around for some time now (through Google Labs), and this support for Indian languages in GMail was built using Transliteration.
We currently support five Indian languages — Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada and Malayalam — and you can select the language of your choice from the drop-down list next to the icon.
– Google Blog