The Rampantly Unofficial Linus Torvalds FAQ

… a collection of trivia and personal facts about Linus.

1. Who is Linus Torvalds?

   He wrote the Linux kernel. If you don’t know that, why are you reading this?

2. What does he look like?

   

3. How should I pronounce “Linus”?

   If you’re speaking Swedish (his milk tongue) it’s /lee'nus/. You can hear this in an audio file

   If you’re speaking English, Linus answers to either /lie'nus/ (long i) or /li'nus/ (short i). We have a sound file of Linus pronouncing his name in English.

4. Where is Linus from?

   Finland. He grew up in Helsinki (the capital of Finland and its largest city). He wrote the Linux kernel while a student at Helsinki University.

5. When was he born?

   December 28th 1969.

6. If Linus is Finnish, why is his birth language Swedish?

   Finland has a significant (about 6%) Swedish-speaking minority population. They call themselves “finlandssvensk” or “finlandssvenskar” and consider themselves Finns; many of their families have lived in Finland for centuries. Swedish is one of Finland’s two official languages.

7. What is Linus’s middle name?

   Many people seem to think think Linus’s middle name is “God”. A few claim it ought to be Eric. But in fact his middle name is “Benedict”. He doesn’t use it much.

8. Where does Linus live?

   He’s now resident in Portland, Oregon USA. Until 2004 he lived in Santa Clara, California, USA, having moved there from Helsinki in early 1997.

9. Does Linus have a home page?

   He has one at http://www.cs.helsinki.fi/~torvalds; it’s got an animated penguin and cute pictures of his baby daughter Patricia Miranda Torvalds.

10. What editor and mail reader does Linus use?

    Linus deftly avoids the most persistent ReligiousWar in the Hacker community by using neither Emacs nor vi. He uses MicroEmacs. And, we are told, Pine as a mail reader.

11. What is Linus’s email address?

    At one time you could probably reach him at torvalds@transmeta.com. You could probably find it easily enough or just go read the kernel mailing list to find out what he is up to. He’s keeping a blog on the Linux Foundation website these days.

    Note: because Linus is who he is, he gets a staggering amount of email that he has to deal with. Don’t waste his time. Linus is too nice a guy to hurt you if you abuse this address, but there are probably about a hundred thousand people who would be displeased enough to mess with you if you did.

12. What does Linus do when he’s not hacking Linux?

    • He works for the Open Source Development Lab.
    • He plays with his baby daughters, Patricia Miranda and Daniela.
    • He drinks beer (especially Guinness). Occasionally he shoots pistols. He does not combine these two activities.
    • He enjoys driving his BMW Z3.
    • Yes, he in fact has a life. We await enlightenment on his other leisure-time activities. Assuming he wants to talk about them.

13. Linus took a job with a non-Linux company?

    Yes, he did. There is a rumor that he considered going to work for Red Hat, but did not want to show favoritism towards any one Linux vendor. Linus has declined to either confirm or deny this rumor. He uses Red Hat at work and SuSE at home.

14. Has Linus ever been wrong about anything?

    Yes, once. He was, by his own admission, “not rational” about the binding of the Linux backspace key. This is also about the only time he has ever pulled rank on anybody.

    We suppose this just goes to show he really is human after all.

    (Linus does not get put into Category:Politics; he just does the job, he very carefully avoids all the politicing surrounding Free vs free etc.)

15. Is there anyone else who often gets forgotten when we talk about Linux?

    Yes. RMS is often forgotten. Remember, he actually probably wrote more of GNU/Linux than Linus did (The OS, not the kernel).

—– CategoryPeople