This manual was created for Sarge's debian-installer, based on the Woody installation manual for boot-floppies, which was based on earlier Debian installation manuals, and on the Progeny distribution manual which was released under GPL in 2003. It was subsequently modified for use in Ubuntu.

This document is written in DocBook XML. Output formats are generated by various programs using information from the docbook-xml and docbook-xsl packages.

In order to increase the maintainability of this document, we use a number of XML features, such as entities and profiling attributes. These play a role akin to variables and conditionals in programming languages. The XML source to this document contains information for each different architecture — profiling attributes are used to isolate certain bits of text as architecture-specific.