At PC Forum in 1997, Jim Barksdale, then the President and CEO of Netscape, said he got the idea for opening his company's browser source code from "this guy Raymond," and identified the originator of Linux as "Linus Pauling." He wasn't too far off. Because Linus Torvalds' parents actually named their boy after the famous American Nobel prize winner and vitamin C wacko.
And there began the tale of two pronunciations that have done nothing but permute. There is not only no consensus about how to pronounce Linux, but this condition appears to derive from an equal uncertainty about how to pronounce Linus. The Web is full of sound files in which Linus says, "Hi, my name is Leenoos Torvahlds and I pronounce Leenooks as Leenooks." More or less. That's Jim Choi's phoneticization of the recording.
But let's face it: that's not complicated enough. Since there is only one letter's difference between Linus and Linux, we thought we'd see how well the two mapped across the Web by searching for the coincidence of Linus and Linux with and various phonetic spellings of the same. As you see, the results are equally absorbing and inconclusive, providing plenty of grist for the disagreement mill.
(Oh, by the way: Leenooks is winner with 90 pages. Lin-ux is second with 72.)