Acknowledgments (Running Linux, 4th Edition)

0.5. Acknowledgments

This book is the result of many people's efforts, and as expected, it would be impossible to list them all here. First of all, we would like to thank Andy Oram, who did an excellent job of editing, writing, and whip-cracking to get this book into shape. Apart from being the overall editor, Andy contributed the Unix tutorial chapter as well as material for the X and Perl sections. It was Andy who approached us about writing for O'Reilly in the first place, and he has demonstrated the patience of a saint when waiting for our updates to trickle in.

Those of you who are already familiar with Linux may notice that some portions of this book, such as the introductory and installation chapters, have been released as part of Linux Installation and Getting Started, a free book available via the Internet. O'Reilly allowed us to release those portions (originally written for this book) to the I&GS, so they could benefit the Internet-based Linux community and we would get feedback and corrections from its readership. Thanks to everyone who contributed edits to those sections.

We would also like to thank the following people for their work on the Linux operating system — without all of them, there wouldn't be anything to write a book about: Linus Torvalds, Richard Stallman, Donald Becker, Alan Cox, Remy Card, Eric Raymond, Ted T'so, H.J. Lu, Miguel de Icaza, Ross Biro, Drew Eckhardt, Ed Carp, Eric Youngdale, Fred van Kempen, Steven Tweedie, Patrick Volkerding, Dirk Hohndel, Matthias Ettrichand, and all of the other hackers, from the kernel grunts to the lowly docos, too numerous to mention here.

Special thanks to the following people for their contributions to the Linux Documentation Project, technical review of this book, or general friendliness and support: Phil Hughes, Melinda McBride, Bill Hahn, Dan Irving, Michael Johnston, Joel Goldberger, Michael K. Johnson, Adam Richter, Roman Yanovsky, Jon Magid, Erik Troan, Lars Wirzenius, Olaf Kirch, Greg Hankins, Alan Sondheim, Jon David, Anna Clark, Adam Goodman, Lee Gomes, Rob Walker, Rob Malda, Jeff Bates, and Volker Lendecke. We are grateful to Shawn Wallace and Umberto Crenca for the gorgeous shot in Chapter 9 of The Gimp in use (Figure 9-5).

For the third edition, we thank Phil Hughes, Robert J. Chassell, Tony Cappellini, Craig Small, Nat Makarevitch, Chris Davis, Chuck Toporek, Frederic HongFeng, and David Pranata for wide-ranging comments and corrections. Particularly impressive were the efforts put in by an entire team of Debian developers and users, organized for us by Ossama Othman and Julian T. J. Midgley. Julian set up a CVS repository for comments and the book was examined collectively by him, Chris Lawrence, Robert J. Chassell, Kirk Hilliard, and Stephen Zander.

For the fourth edition, we thank David Collier-Brown, Oliver Flimm, Phil Hughes, Chris Lawrence, Rich Payne, Craig Small, Jeff Tranter, and Aaron Weber for their reviews. Matt Welsh would especially like to thank his fiancée, Amy Bauer, for her love and support, as well as for paying for half of the DSL line at home.

Kalle would like to thank Valerica Vatafu from Buzau, Romania, for lots of help with the chapter about LAMP. He would also like to thank his colleagues in his company Klarälvdalens Datakonsult AB — Michael Boyer de la Giroday, Tanja Dalheimer, Steffen Hansen, Jesper Pedersen, Lutz Rogowski, Bo Thorsen, and Karl-Heinz Zimmer — for their constructive comments on drafts of the book as well as for being general "Linux thought amplifiers."

This edition benefited from the contributions of experts in various subject areas. In particular, we'd like to thank Jeff Tranter, for the audio configuration information in Chapter 9 and for updating online sources of Linux information in Appendix A and in the Bibliography; Aaron Weber of Ximian, for the material on the GNOME desktop in Chapter 11; Kyle Dent, for the material on the Postfix mail transfer agent in Chapter 16; Jay Ts, for rewriting the section on Samba in Chapter 12; Chris Lawrence, for the material on upgrading packages on Debian in Chapter 7; and Barrett G. Lyon and Richard Payne, for the material on installing Linux on Compaq/Digital Alpha systems in Appendix B (updated by Richard Payne for the fourth edition).

If you have questions, comments, or corrections for this book, please feel free to get in touch with the authors. Matt Welsh can be reached on the Internet at mdw@cs.berkeley.edu. Lar Kaufman can be reached at lark@conserve.org. Kalle Dalheimer can be reached at kalle@dalheimer.de.