Tux is racing in the Indianapolis 500

Tux the penguin is on the nose of an Indianapolis 500 car. Tux is the mascot for the computer operating system Linux. As a Linux user, I am very thrilled to see this. Unfortunately it did not come to my attention until this morning. It is too late to promote for donations.

The original goal of the guys at Tux500 was to raise $350,000, enough to fully sponsor a car in the race. Instead, they were able to pull together $18,300 and got a nice prominent spot on the nosecone of the Chastain Motorsports’ No. 77 car.

News.com has some nice photos you can see of the car and logo.

At their website you can also see a nice video that the Tux500 crew put together about the event. I just wished I knew about it sooner so that I could have helped with the promotion. Maybe they will do it again next year.

Here is their news release from yesterday afternoon.

The End of a Campaign, the Beginning of a Movement

Saturday, May 26 2007 @ 10:20 AM MDT
Contributed by: bob
Views: 677

At Noon EDT, the Tux 500 campaign came to an end. The final donation came in, the final piece of merchandise was purchased. We have tallied all of the donations, and what was earned from t-shirts, mugs, bumper stickers, and the like. The final amount raised by the Tux500 project is….

* drumroll *

$18,308.90!

Thank you to everyone in the Linux community that made this happen! Tux is going to look sweet tomorrow on the nosecone of the #77 Chastain Motorsport’s car, as Roberto Moreno guides him (yes, a guided penguin missle!) around the speedway at speeds of 220 mph!

One very interesting thing to note is that over the last few days, on our statistics page, a new distro has been jumping up the charts. Due to the effort of fans of the Linux From Scratch project, it is now the #2 distro in terms of contributions! An additional thanks to you, for the final push over $18000!

Next week, we’ll talk about the project, and where we go from here. Today and tomorrow, we’ll bask in what we all have accomplished… what this community has done is truly historic. And I believe this is only the beginning!

Don’t miss the race tomorrow… it starts at 1pm EDT (UTC-4) and pre-race coverage begins 1 hour before the race in most markets. Enjoy this people… we’ve all earned it!

GO TUX!