Happy Christmas, ladies and gentlecats...

'Twas the night before Christmas, when all through the house
Not a computer was stirring, neither keyboard nor mouse;
The packages were updated, each one with care,
In hopes that St. Linus soon would be there;

The daemons were idle using no CPU,
The firewall working left them nothing to do;
And I with emerge, and Akira with apt-get,
Had just settled down for a long winter's fetch,

When out on the net there arose such a clatter,
I sprang to kernel.org to see what was the matter.
Away to my browser I flew like a flash,
Opened a new tab and clicked the link mighty fast.

The words on my screen with release notes just so
Gave the lustre of mid-day to source code below,
When, what would make my wondering eyes smile,
But a official release in a gzipped tar file,

"Now, Red Hat! now, S.u.S.E.! now, Ubuntu and Knoppix!
On, Slackware! on Debian! on Gentoo and Gnoppix!
To the nearest mirror! to the next major release!
Now build away! build away! build away all!"

As dry leaves that before the wild hurricane fly,
When they meet with an obstacle, mount to the sky,
So up to the mirrors the hackers they flew,
To see their new toys, and thank St. Linus too.

He sprang to his keyboard, to his team sent a note,
And away they all flew to 2.7, new features they wrote,
But I heard him exclaim, ere make config was gone,
"HAPPY HACKING TO ALL, AND YOUR uptime RESTARTS AT DAWN!"