Hey remember when VirtualBox came out and everyone thought that the VBoxGina module (for automated logons) name was so hilarious? Well me neither.

Still, it got me thinking about some of the weirdest linux packages out there. You know the ones. The ones that, if you’re Googling them while at work, you make damn sure to include the word Linux or Ubuntu in your search. Because surprising results can happen when you Google for ‘man beef’. Ok, it wasn’t surprising at all.

Anyway, here’s a short list of some of the weirdest linux/Ubuntu packages out there in repository land:

scrot – Which is a command line screen capture utility, i.e., SCReen shOT. That means if you have to look at the man page, you’ll be forced to type “man scrot”. Fine. You don’t think that’s so bad? How about:

scrotwm – This is a dynamic tiling window manager. And yes, this means that you’ll eventually be typing “man scrotwm”. I doesn’t get more obvious than that. Oh wait it does:

liboobs-1-4 – Which I was surprised was installed on my machine. No, there’s no man page for liboobs-1-4, but it does provide a GObject based interface for system-tools-backends. Yay.

beef – That’s right.Open up a shell and type ‘man beef’ and you’ll get the man page for ‘beef’ aka the flexible Brainfuck interpreter. Brainfuck has its own Wikipedia entry cause it has such an awesome name. Brainfuck is basically a programming language written in C that’s so minimalist that it’s basically unreadable. If your colleague is using it, you probably need to pie them in the face with a textbook. Still, beef is pretty damn efficient. Bastards.

And that’s all I got. I could go on about ‘tar‘ and the hilariousness of typing ‘man tar‘ 20 times a day, but that one’s been over done to death.Either way, let us know if you’ve come across some crazily named packages yourself. Do it.

* This isn’t related to that old Man Beef Hoax. Or maybe it is. I don’t care either way.