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The Many Names of Linux Kernels
dartttt writes "Not many people know that Kernel releases have their codenames. Most of the Linux 2.6 and 3.x kernels include a name in the Makefile of their source trees, which can be found in the git repository. They are not publicized as such but some of them are really hilarious."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Linux_kernel_names is the link worth going to if you want to find out what they are.
I used to own numerous 2.6.20's (they bred a lot) and I currently have a 2.6.21. I was also attacked by a 2.6.28-rc1 once, although it could have been a 2.6.36.
So, is this where ubuntu gets its inspiration for its names?
Someone please ask the pink weasels to stop farting. Actually, to be politically correct, just ask all the weasels to stop farting. No need to single out the pink ones.
And to that, weasels are just people who fart on airplanes and look around at their neighbor to seemingly accuse them of having let it go. I didn't do it!!
The Duchess emitted an enormous fart. Thinking to shift the blame, she told the butler "Stop that immediately."
He replied "Which way did it go."
NAME = "Divemaster Edition"
NAME = Sneaky Weasel
NAME = Flesh-Eating Bats with Fangs
NAME = Sheep on Meth
NAME = Man-Eating Seals of Antiquity
NAME = Vindictive Armadillo
NAME = Temporary Tasmanian Devil
NAME = Erotic Pickled Herring
NAME = Killer Bat of Doom
NAME = Rotary Wombat
NAME = Funky Weasel is Jiggy wit it
NAME = Arr Matey! A Hairy Bilge Rat!
NAME = Pink Farting Weasel
NAME = Holy Dancing Manatees, Batman!
NAME = Nocturnal Monster Puppy
NAME = Homicidal Dwarf Hamster
This isn't a totally trivial question. I've often seen comments in forums saying that something works in kernels from the Frosty Ferret release to the Manifest Monkey release. So I want to check out some of the systems that I'm responsible for, and for each of them, I'd like to discover whether they're within the stated range. The problem is that I often can't discover a given kernel's codename. I can get the kernel's release number from "uname -a", but there doesn't seem to be any reliable way to compare that with codenames in forum messages. So I often can't figure out whether such forum messages apply to the kernels that I'm ssh'd to.
So is there a general way to map the dotted-number release numbers to the codenames, and vice-versa? If there is, I could put it into a script that's in the toolkit that I copy around to systems. I'd also put it on my web sites, so I can fetch it quickly from a new machine (and you could, too, as soon as a googlebot stumbles across it, if you guess the right keywords that I'd include in the header comments ;-).
So far, the answers to this question all seem to be of the form "If you're on a sytem Foo, here's how you do it ...". So you need to know the answer to the question in order to ask the question. I'm hoping for something a bit less circular. And preferably something scriptable.
I've often wondered why this information has been universally excluded from what "uname -a" returns. Making use of forum replies would be a lot easier if either people would use the release numbers, or we had a simple way of mapping codenames to release numbers.
This isn't just a linux problem. I'm typing this on a Macbook Pro, one of around a half dozen that I have access to. I can get the kernel's number (10.5.8) from the "About this Mac" menu item at the top left, but I don't know the kernel's name. I did a bit of poking around in /etc and /System, and didn't find it. There's probably a table of the names/numbers somewhere at apple.com, but google doesn't seem to know where it is. The problem is similar on other unix-like systems.
Anyone know an algorithm for finding a random kernel's name? (Anything of the form "If it's <X> ..." is disqualified. ;-)
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.