Many people have helped me with this book, directly or indirectly. I would like to especially thank Matt Welsh for inspiration and LDP leadership, Andy Oram for getting me to work again with much-valued feedback, Olaf Kirch for showing me that it can be done, and Adam Richter at Yggdrasil and others for showing me that other people can find it interesting as well.
Stephen Tweedie, H. Peter Anvin, Remy Card, Theodore Ts'o, and Stephen Tweedie have let me borrow their work (and thus make the book look thicker and much more impressive): a comparison between the xia and ext2 filesystems, the device list and a description of the ext2 filesystem. These aren't part of the book any more. I am most grateful for this, and very apologetic for the earlier versions that sometimes lacked proper attribution.
In addition, I would like to thank Mark Komarinski for sending his material in 1993 and the many system administration columns in Linux Journal. They are quite informative and inspirational.
Many useful comments have been sent by a large number of people. My miniature black hole of an archive doesn't let me find all their names, but some of them are, in alphabetical order: Paul Caprioli, Ales Cepek, Marie-France Declerfayt, Dave Dobson, Olaf Flebbe, Helmut Geyer, Larry Greenfield and his father, Stephen Harris, Jyrki Havia, Jim Haynes, York Lam, Timothy Andrew Lister, Jim Lynch, Michael J. Micek, Jacob Navia, Dan Poirier, Daniel Quinlan, Jouni K Seppänen, Philippe Steindl, G.B. Stotte. My apologies to anyone I have forgotten.
I would like to thank Lars and Joanna for their hard work on the guide.
In a guide like this one there are likely to be at least
some minor inaccuracies. And there are almost certainly going to
be sections that become out of date from time to time. If you
notice any of this then please let me know by sending me an email
to: <bagpuss@debian.org.NOSPAM>. I will take virtually
any form of input (diffs, just plain text, html, whatever), I am
in no way above allowing others to help me maintain such a large
text as this :)
Many thanks to Helen Topping Shaw for getting the red pen out and making the text far better than it would otherwise have been. Also thanks are due just for being wonderful.
I would like to thank Lars, Joanna, and Stephen for all the great work that they have done on this document over the years. I only hope that my contribution will be worthy of continuing the work they started.
Like the previous maintainers, I openly welcome any comments, suggestions, complains, corrections, or any other form of feedback you may have. This document can only benefit from the suggestions of those who use it.
There have been many people who have helped me on my journey through the "Windows-Free" world, the person I feel I need to thank the most is my first true UN*X mentor, Mike Velasco. Back in a time before SCO became a "dirty word", Mike helped me on the path of tar's, cpio's, and many, many man pages. Thanks Mike! You are the 'Sofa King'.