Debian parodies, Iceweasel and Icedove

Few days back while going through an article about new Knoppix 5.3.0 I came upon the two familiar but unheard tools i.e. Iceweasel and Icedove, both followed by the names Firefox & Thunderbird 2.0 in brackets respectively. For a moment I began to muse about when did these two names came into existence for the two most popular open source internet tools. After a little googling and going through wikipedia I got my answer.

Mozilla corporation holds trademark for name Firefox and its logo. Unofficial releases of Firefox can’t use the same unless they use the binaries supplied by Mozilla or have special permission. If none of the two conditions satisfies then one must compile the source with an option that gives the generated binaries code-name of the release version of the Firefox on which it is based, and which doesn’t use the official logo or any other artwork.

Iceweasel and Icedove are the re-branded version of Firefox and Thunderbird maintained by Debian. Debian guidelines, commonly known as Debian Free Software Guidelines, states that all parts of Debian distribution should be modifiable by those who use it. This conflicts with the licensing and strict guidelines of Mozilla Trademark Policy. As a result Debian forked the development of Firefox & Thunderbird projects with new names together with some extra features and a logo which is freely licensed.

Carriage Return (CR) & Line Feed (LF)

Today while playing with `od` - a command-line tool to dump file data in octal and other formats - and looking at 012 (octal code of \n) it just came to my mind to find out the difference between carriage return (\r) and line feed (\n) characters and how do they date back in history. I got my answer from the very first attempt in Google which directly led me to Yahoo answers.

The two characters emulate the two main actions in typewriters. Carriage-Return which moves the cursor back to the beginning of the line corresponds to the moving of typewriter’s carriage to the initial leftmost position, whereas Line-Feed which move the cursor to the next line corresponds to the rolling up of paper by one line. The combination of both i.e. CR-LF were initially used in Teletypewriters to move the print head back to the beginning of new line.

Even though the two still performs the same action in standard output and printers, not all operating systems use both of them. *nix based systems use \n, Mac uses \r, whereas Windows uses both \r\n. This is a reasons why *nix text documents look weird in windows.

Some common abbreviations to remember

GDK	GIMP Drawing Kit
GIMP	GNU Image Manipulation Program
GNOME	GNU Network Object Model Environment
GNU	GNU is not Unix
GTK	GIMP Tool Kit