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It's not Linux it's GNU/Linux and Why That Name Will Never Take Off

The name of the OS is not Linux. It's GNU/Linux, and it's pronounced “GaNew Linux,” but the name is not being used by the public and this bothers the GNU people. Here's why.

The name GNU which is not even pronounced as it looks sucks for a name! Plain and simple.

“The GNU Project was launched in 1984 to develop the GNU system. The name 'GNU' is a recursive acronym for 'GNU's Not Unix!'. 'GNU' is pronounced g'noo, as one syllable, like saying 'grew' but replacing the r with n,” so say the people at www.gnu.org.

It turns out that Linux is just the kernel -- a vital and important part of any operating system -- but the bulk of the free software that is included with any Linux distribution, or FreeBSD for that matter, is from the GNU people, and they absolutely resent having the name “GNU” left out of any Linux or FreeBSD distribution and rightly so.

Unfortunately, however, it will never be as they want, because they have a terrible name, and in the advertising world it's all about promoting a name. Saying “I run Linux on my computer” is a lot easier than saying “I run GNU/Linux on my computer.”

Gnu.org says that “a Unix-like operating system is a software collection of applications, libraries, and developer tools, plus a program to allocate resources and talk to the hardware, known as a kernel.

“...GNU is typically used today with a kernel called Linux. This combination is the GNU/Linux operating system. GNU/Linux is used by millions, though many call it 'Linux' by mistake.”

These good people struggle with that mistake daily and resent us all for saying “Linux” leaving out the “GaNew” pronunciation of GNU in the name of our OS of choice!

Now the thing is, although most of the software in any Linux or BSD distribution was created and is distributed by the GNU people, the name does not and will not ever take off in the media or general public because the name simply sucks and is hard for people to pronounce, what to speak even know the correct what to pronounce it in the first place. (Most people wrongly default to the pronunciation “New” when they see GNU.)

It snows in Texas!

Most people think of Texas as a hot place. The problem is those people have no conception how big is the second largest state in the United States both population and size-wise. It's bigger than the entire country of Spain and bigger than France.

Where I live is in Amarillo, Texas, which is smack in the middle of the Texas Panhandle. Here the elevation is about 3700 feet (1127 meters) above sea level in the “high planes.” The high planes is a sub-region of the Great Planes. The area is well known for high westerly winds and extreme temperatures: the difference in temperature from night and day “commonly exceeds 59 °F (15 °C)” (Wikipedia).

We have jokes here about the wind. “It was so windy today I saw a chicken facing downwind lay the same egg 6 times. I saw a house blow down the street like a piece of tumbleweed. It was so windy I had to bungee cord my house to the ground. It was so windy this guy driving into town from Lubbock ran out of gas in Canyon, Texas, but he made it all the way into Amarillo by opening his car doors and blowing into town.”

But the snow in Texas is not really very much. Sometimes in Amarillo we'll get an inch. Sometimes even 3 or 4 inches. Rarely it gets deeper than that. Most of the time it melts away. One or two days may be really cold, below freezing, and then the next week it may be 60 or 70 degrees Fahrenheit. The summer, on the other hand, tends to be really hot. Last summer, the hottest on record, we had more than 50 days over 100 degrees. (The previous record was 26 days over 100F.) One day last summer it was 114 degrees Fahrenheit!

In spite of the heat, it tends to be low humidity in the summer, which means it feels cooler than it is.

Trees do not grow naturally here. This is naturally grassland and sagebrush country. So if you want trees, you have to buy them! Where I come from if you want to build you have to cut down trees because they grow like weeds, but not around here in the Texas Panhandle!

More Amazing Mazes

Recently I posted some new mazes that will amaze, mezmerize, alure and confuse you. Check out Map of London, or It Turns Out (Politicians are Aliens), or Disappointed About Earth, or even save the world by solving Black Hole!

HUD and Unity Break the Back

Linux Mint 13, the Ubuntu-based distribution's next release, will come with Cinnamon - a fork of GNOME Shell made to resemble a GNOME 2 desktop. Computerworld's Joab Jackson explains in "Linux Mint 13 gets back to desktop basics": "Bucking the trend of increasingly experimental desktop interfaces, the developers behind Linux Mint are adopting a simpler desktop for the next version of the open-source Linux distribution. Linux Mint 13 will feature an entirely new user interface, called Cinnamon. Earlier this week, the Linux Mint developers released a version of the shell. 'We're hoping [Cinnamon] will seduce most Linux Mint users, whether they're coming from GNOME 2, Gnome Shell or other desktops,' said Linux Mint creator and lead developer Clement Lefebvre. In a world where the interfaces of desktop operating systems are increasingly streamlined, Cinnamon appears to be quite a conservative design, not surprising given the goals of the Linux Mint project."

Why this website wasn't updated for a long time

Nobody likes to visit a website that's supposed to be regularly updated and see it's not been updated. Well, I ran into a programming glitch and am still strying to work through the lines of code to figure it out! That's why the page wasn't updated!

You see, this website was created by me as a programming experiment. It is entirely programmed in PHP and MySQL, and all of the information on every page is stored in a MySQL database. To update any page, and write words like the ones you're reading now, means updating the database. I had finally accomplished being able to do that simply by my logging in, and I had a link at the bottom of every column I could click and then type away. I never had to actually "get in" to the database itself anymore. Until one day. One day I was fooling with the code and broke it, and haven't fixed it yet! Still working on it!

Programmers can get lost in their own lines of code!