Li lee or lie?
Nux nuks or nerks? Nooks?
Anyone?
PhengSiong
Singapore (Which schools teach English not American.)
Oh god. We just hashed this through on alt.os.linux. It /definitely/
needs to go into the FAQ.
'li' is pronounced with a short [ee] sound: compare prInt, mInImal etc.
'nux' is also short, non-diphtong, like in pUt. It's partly due to
minix: linux was just my working name for the thing, and as I wrote it
to replace minix on my system, the result is what it is... linus' minix
became linux.
I originally intended it to be called freax (although buggix was one
contender after I got fed up with some of the more persistent bugs :)
and I think the kernel makefiles up to version 0.11 had something to
that effect ("Makefile for the freax kernel" in a comment). But arl
called the linux directory at nic.funet.fi pub/OS/Linux, and the name
stuck. Maybe just as well: freax doesn't sound too good either (freax
is obviosly free + freak + the obligatory -x).
Linus
Personally, I've always thought it should be called 'Nina':
'Neither is Nina, actually'. By analogy with GNU, you know... :-)