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 and the Gaim section 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.

Because this book has grown so much in size and scope, its topics have become too diverse for one person, or even a small set of coauthors. Therefore, we have drawn in experts in a number of subject areas, listed near the beginning of the preface, to write substantial material.

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 Ettrich, 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.

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.

For the fifth edition, we thank Ben Hyde, Cheridy Jollie, Chris Lawrence, Ellen Siever, and Jeff Tranter.

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 Michel Boyer de la Giroday, Tanja Dalheimer, Steffen Hansen, Jesper Pedersen, Lutz Rogowski, Karl-Heinz Zimmer, Tobias Larsson, Romain Pokrzywka, David Faure, Marc Mutz, Tobias Larsson, and Till Adam for their constructive comments on drafts of the book as well as for being general "Linux thought amplifiers."