Ubuntu was created in 2004 by an astronaut named Mark Shuttleworth (also known as the SABDFL, Self Admiring, Buys Debian For Loosechange). Ubuntu's body was originally made out of materials taken from the silverware cabinets of the Debian project leaders. This first body was shaped like a warthog. This design was intended to allow Ubuntu to move around easily on the surface of the Moon, one of the missions Shuttleworth originally envisioned for his creation.

Early versions of the Debian project were based on SCO Unix, which was deemed to be sufficiently obsolete for Debian's purposes. However, due to this colonel's inclusion in Debian, it came to the attention of Linus Torvalds, who used parts of it as the basis for his terminal emulation software, Linux, which eventually became headstrong, gained rank, and was promoted to the position of colonel in its own right. Consequently, the Debian project leaders determined that this was too much active development, and so they switched to the GNU Heard colonel, which apparently has never seen active development.