Those of you who will go to DebConf 6, be careful.

(Someone’s into vintage uniforms, and it’s not me. BTW, jacobo.age++ today).

Many Linux distributions suffer the curse of the Galician-Portuguese words. This means that many of such distributions have names which look or sound like (or are) Galician and/or Portuguese words.

For example, “Ubuntu” sounds, in Portuguese, like “O Ponto”, which means “The Point”. “Debian” means, in Galician, “They Should” or “They Owed”. “Centos” means “Hundreds” (and reminds Galician speakers of “Centolos”, “Spider Crabs”). “Fedora” looks like “Fedor”, which means “Stench”. “Nexenta” looks like the Galician word “Noxenta”, which means “Disgusting”.

AFAIK, “Red Hat”, “Slackware”, “Caldera OpenLinux”, “SuSE”, “Mandrake” (sorry, “Mandriva”) and “Yggdrasil” mean nothing in Galician or Portuguese, but I’m sure that, given enough beer, somebody will be able to think of something.

(As a speaker of Galician, I can offer my services as a naming consultant. My fees may look expensive, but think of the advantages of not having millions of Brazilians laugh at your distribution’s name!)