Question: I made some bug fixes to an open source project on my local machine. I pushed the code to my github account then initiated a pull request (from? for? to?) the original author of the code. 

Why does my username show up as "ubuntu" on github? I did push from an Ubuntu machine, but under no circumstances do I want anyone on github to know my operating system or username. In this case both were revealed. 

Why on earth did this happen and how do I prevent it?

Github says something about associating my email address with my account... I didn't push from an email address. I'm so confused.

Answer: 
Have you tried updating the .gitconfig file on your system?

if not, you can use these commands to set your name and email for github to show when you commit code in the repo.

`git config --global user.email "your@email.com"`

`git config --global user.name "Your Name"`

the `--global` flag makes these settings available systemwide, so when you commit to any repo you have access to, this name shows up.
When you did your commit, there was probably a message that there was no Username associated with the repo. So it used the name of your account/computer as the user that made the commit. If you do a `git log` in your local repo, you should see `Author: Ubunut` in the commit.

You can set an Username/Email with:

```
git config --global user.name "John Doe"
git config --global user.email johndoe@example.com

```

This will set the Name and email for all the repos that you have. If you want to change it for a specific one just drop off the `--global`

<http://git-scm.com/book/en/Customizing-Git-Git-Configuration>