Dead Penguin Linux (DPL) is a new Linux distribution, made by the gaggle over at Shenfield High School. It’s a lightweight distribution with an incredible punch, capable of running vast and complex systems using the unique processing power of a dead penguin. DPL uses a source based package system called ‘guts’, which deals with most packages within seconds due to the power of the penguin.

Install Process

The install process can be rather messy, so it recommended that you get assistance on the first penguin that you install DPL on. Firstly, you need to find a dead penguin. A good place to look is the side of major roads, such as the M25 (around London) or the B184 (a small road where I live). You want to find a penguin that is in a reasonable shape, preferably with its head attached and in less than two pieces. The best place to find a penguin, in my experience, it to look under Double Decker buses carrying school children. If you are unable to find a dead penguin, you can find a live one and cause a road accident (although this is illegal, and I am not condoning this), or you could ask for one in your local hardware store.

Once you’ve got a dead penguin, you need to install DPL on it. Before anything else, you need to wash your hands with white spirits, as you don’t want the penguin catching anything from you, and causing faulty hardware. The last thing you want, speaking from first hand experience, is an invalid patch error in your guts.

The next step can be very tricky, and I’d personally recommend a different measurement for the incision. The manual for DPL says that you need to make a 52.6377953 inch cut up the stomach of the penguin. However, I found it a lot easier to use a ruler in mm and cut the appropriate distance. Now for the fun part. You need to remove all of the organs from within the penguin, or the parts of the organs you can see if you got an unlucky bit of road kill. The only organs that should be remaining within the penguin are: the stomach, which is used for the /home/ partition, the bladder, used for ~/.trash/, the heart, which is the extremely powerful processing unit, and lastly the lungs which provide a short term memory, around a twinkling (which for some reason is 2.3 seconds).

By now, you would have cleared out most of the internal organs of the penguin, which just leaves the data transfer to load DPL onto the penguin. For this, you need at least 20cm of CAT5e (Standard Ethernet) cable, and you need to insert it into the bottom of the penguin’s left lung, and then into its stomach. Once this is done, you need to stitch the stomach back up, making sure that you leave room for expansion bays in the future.

Last, but not least, you need to provide power to the penguin. Due to the nature of a penguin DNA, it can power itself by digesting the trash; however, you need to power up the boot process. To do this, insert 3 AA batteries up the penguin’s nose. Be careful that you make the positive ends of the batteries slide in first; otherwise it’ll get stuck in a continuous reboot. Then you’re ready to boot it up for the first time. Gently open the mouth of the penguin, and pull out the tongue, and you should hear some moaning as it boots up.

First Boot

As Dead Penguin Linux boots for the first time, find the nearest screen (TV or monitor) and switch it on to see your newly installed system. Once the system has booted, you’ll have to follow a simple set of questions to continue setting up your system. It will ask you to enter in your system name, your personal account username and password, as well as the size of your penguin.

After these simple questions, your penguin will boot into your brand new operating system. From here, you can install a wide range of 32 programs, from a wireless network detector, to a road kill detector.

Office Opinions

After running this version in the office for a week, we decided that the power provided by the dead penguin is amazing, more than any current servers on the market. However, we did notice a residue of cocaine building up on the desk next to the penguin, although that may be an employee. We would highly recommend Dead Penguin Linux to anyone who wants to try new things out, or the person who needs raw processing power. One can only imagine that with the release of 0.2 in the next few months, more programs and even more power will find its way onto our road killed penguins.

Get Dead Penguin Linux

Although Dead Penguin Linux has been officially released, very few mirrors exist for it. In order to find more information out about Dead Penguin Linux, please visit their website at www.deadpenguinlinux.org.