[Juan Pablo]

I have always been curious about the names of the Linux distros, just found the meaning of Gentoo (a very fast penguin)

But what about other distros like Debian?

[nature]

thats cool never heard about it

[carlosponti]

Slackware
The name "Slackware" stems from the term "Slack", as defined by the Church of the SubGenius.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slackware

Mepis
On November 21, 2002, Warren decided that if he wanted things done right he would have to do them himself. According to Warren Woodford himself, the name MEPIS is pronounced like "Memphis" (the city in Tennessee, United States) with the extra letters removed and of course not pronounced. The word "MEPIS" doesn't mean anything in particular, it came about by mistake, Warren misunderstood a friend over a bad phone connection, he decided to keep the name because it was a simple five-letter word and there were no other companies or products with that name.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mepis

ubuntu comes from
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ubuntu_%28ideology%29

[Kojak]

SUSE - short for "System- und Software Elektronik"

Red Hat - named after the founders mark, a red fedora he came to work with.

Fedora - Spin off from Red Hat, kept the fedora-hat idea

Debian - AFAIK it is a mixture from the names Deborah and Ian

Yoper - Your OPERating system. No further explanation needed, I guess.

Mandrake - Named after the wizard Mandrake as it worked "magically", after the merging with Conectiva (Brazil) they became Mandriva.

Knoppix - Named after Klaus Knopper. Knopp + X = Knoppix.

Kanotix - Similar to Knoppix, named after Kano, the developer.

Linspire - originally named Lindows (guess why? ), had some legal problems with some well known company, then renamed to Linspire. Linux inspiration.

[ozar]

Originally Posted by Juan Pablo

But what about other distros like Debian?

It was created by Ian Murdock who had a girlfriend (she later married him) named Debra. He took the first three letters of her name, "Deb", and added them to his three letter name "Ian" making: Debian

Edit: oops, Kojak was quicker than me...

[d38dm8nw81k1ng]

Originally Posted by Kojak

Linspire - originally named Lindows (guess why? ), had some legal problems with some well known company, then renamed to Linspire. Linux inspiration.

iirc the reason linspire changed their name was the pay-off they got from MS (whom iirc, were losing the case).