5.3. Special Thanks to Contributors
This book would not be what it is without the contributions of several persons who each played an important role. We would like to thank Marilyne Brun, who helped us to translate the sample chapter and who worked with us to define some common translation rules. She also revised several chapters which were desperately in need of supplementary work. Thank you to Anthony Baldwin (of Baldwin Linguas) who translated several chapters for us.
We benefited from the generous help of proofreaders: Daniel Phillips, Gerold Rupprecht, Gordon Dey, Jacob Owens, and Tom Syroid. They each reviewed many chapters. Thank you very much!
If you have the pleasure to read these lines in a paperback copy of the book, then you should join us to thank Benoît Guillon, Jean-Côme Charpentier, and Sébastien Mengin who worked on the interior book design. Benoît is the upstream author of dblatex — the tool we used to convert DocBook into LaTeX (and then PDF). Sébastien is the designer who created this nice book layout and Jean-Côme is the LaTeX expert who implemented it as a stylesheet usable with dblatex. Thank you guys for all the hard work!
Finally, thank you to Thierry Stempfel for the nice pictures introducing each chapter, and thank you to Doru Patrascu for the beautiful book cover.
5.4. Personal Acknowledgments from Raphaël
First off, I would like to thank Nat Makarevitch, who offered me the possibility to write this book and who provided strong guidance during the year it took to get it done. Thank you also to the fine team at Eyrolles, and Muriel Shan Sei Fan in particular. She has been very patient with me and I learned a lot with her.
The period of the Ulule campaign was very demanding for me but I would like to thank everybody who helped to make it a success, and in particular the Ulule team who reacted very quickly to my many requests. Thank you also to everybody who promoted the operation. I don't have any exhaustive list (and if I had it would probably be too long) but I would like to thank a few people who were in touch with me: Joey-Elijah Sneddon and Benjamin Humphrey of OMG! Ubuntu, Frédéric Couchet of April.org, Jake Edge of Linux Weekly News, Clement Lefebvre of Linux Mint, Ladislav Bodnar of Distrowatch, Steve Kemp of Debian-Administration.org, Christian Pfeiffer Jensen of Debian-News.net, Artem Nosulchik of LinuxScrew.com, Stephan Ramoin of Gandi.net, Matthew Bloch of Bytemark.co.uk, the team at Divergence FM, Rikki Kite of Linux New Media, Jono Bacon, the marketing team at Eyrolles, and numerous others that I have forgotten (sorry about that).
I would like to address a special thanks to Roland Mas, my co-author. We have been collaborating on this book since the start and he has always been up to the challenge. And I must say that completing the Debian Administrator's Handbook has been a lot of work…
Last but not least, thank you to my wife, Sophie. She has been very supportive of my work on this book and on Debian in general. There have been too many days (and nights) when I left her alone with our 2-year-old son to make some progress on the book. I am grateful for her support and know how lucky I am to have her.
5.5. Personal Acknowledgments from Roland
Well, Raphaël preempted most of my “external” thank-yous already. I am still going to emphasize my personal gratitude to the good folks at Eyrolles, with whom collaboration has always been pleasant and smooth. Hopefully the results of their excellent advice hasn't been lost in translation.
I am extremely grateful to Raphaël for taking on the administrative part of this English edition. From organizing the funding campaign to the last details of the book layout, producing a translated book is so much more than just translating and proofreading, and Raphaël did (or delegated and supervised) it all. So thanks.
Thanks also to all who more or less directly contributed to this book, by providing clarifications or explanations, or translating advice. They are too many to mention, but most of them can usually be found on various #debian-* IRC channels.
There is of course some overlap with the previous set of people, but specific thanks are still in order for the people who actually do Debian. There wouldn't be much of a book without them, and I am still amazed at what the Debian project as a whole produces and makes available to any and all.
More personal thanks go to my friends and my clients, for their understanding when I was less responsive because I was working on this book, and also for their constant support, encouragement and egging on. You know who you are; thanks.
And finally; I am sure they would be surprised by being mentioned here, but I would like to extend my gratitude to Terry Pratchett, Jasper Fforde, Tom Holt, William Gibson, Neal Stephenson, and of course the late Douglas Adams. The countless hours I spent enjoying their books are directly responsible for my being able to take part in translating this one.
Chapter 1. The Debian Project
Before diving right into the technology, let us have a look at what the Debian Project is, its objectives, its means, and its operations.
1.1. What Is Debian?
CULTURE Origin of the Debian name
Look no further: Debian is not an acronym. This name is, in reality, a contraction of two first names: that of Ian Murdock, and his girlfriend at the time, Debra. Debra + Ian = Debian.
Debian is a GNU/Linux and GNU/kFreeBSD distribution. We will discuss what a distribution is in further detail in Section 1.4, “The Role of Distributions”, but for now, we will simply state that it is a complete operating system, including software and systems for installation and management, all based on the Linux or FreeBSD kernel and free software (especially those from the GNU project).
When he created Debian, in 1993, under the leadership of the FSF, Ian Murdock had clear objectives, which he expressed in the Debian Manifesto. The free operating system that he sought would have to have two principal features. First, quality: Debian would be developed with the greatest care, to be worthy of the Linux kernel. It would also be a non-commercial distribution, sufficiently credible to compete with major commercial distributions. This double ambition would, in his eyes, only be achieved by opening the Debian development process just like that of Linux and the GNU project. Thus, peer review would continuously improve the product.
CULTURE GNU, the project of the FSF
The GNU project is a range of free software developed, or sponsored, by the Free Software Foundation (FSF), originated by its iconic leader, Dr. Richard M. Stallman. GNU is a recursive acronym, standing for “GNU is Not Unix”.