The bastard child of Chuck, the
BSD daemon, and
Homer Simpson.
Tux is the official mascot for the Linux Operating System, as
selected by Linus Torvalds. Since at least the early 1.3.x days there has been a tradition for naming kernels after animals ("Greased Weasel" comes to mind), and when 2.x rolled around
the word "penguin" kept popping up. It was at this time that Linus decided that the OS needed a mascot.