Preface

WRITING A BOOK is a difficult process. When you decide to write a book about a particular subject, you collate your knowledge on a subject, present it in a clear and easy-to-read way, and organize your ideas and knowledge in a sensible order. This is difficult enough when the subject you are writing about stays largely the same for the writing period. It becomes even more complex when you are writing about a moving target.

When we began writing this book, the Dapper Drake release of Ubuntu, which has been released and is used on computers around the world, was not actually finished. With Dapper heavily in development, the idea to create The Official Ubuntu Book emerged. After a few months of authors meeting to flesh out an outline, writing began about three months before Dapper was complete.

This moving target made the writing process particularly interesting. As an example, as Jono was writing the chapter on Ubuntu installation, the new graphical Ubiquity installer had yet to be completed. Each day Jono would download the latest code and update the chapter accordingly. As Jono kept a close eye on Ubiquity's progress, he became more involved in its development and contributed bug reports and thoughts to Colin Watson, the primary developer behind Ubiquity.

This is particularly interesting as the development of this book largely mirrored the very ethos and semantics behind the development of Ubuntu itself. Ubuntu is an operating system that grows organically. The proposed feature set and development process within the Ubuntu community are created in a largely iterative way. Every day the distribution grows in slightly different areas, with members in each area working together to move Ubuntu forward. Within the book's development process, the content was also crafted, rewritten, adjusted, and allowed to mature in different waysmuch like Ubuntu itself.

With such a different take on book development, it is important to stress that The Official Ubuntu Book is not a typical book at all. Traditional books are typically written about a specific subject by one or two authors, published, sold in bookshops, and that's it. But The Official Ubuntu Book is different.

First, although the majority of this book was written by the authors listed on the front cover, we also sought contributions directly from the Ubuntu community. Jono drafted an announcement seeking recipes. Jeff Waugh then posted the announcement on the Fridge, Ubuntu's news site (http://fridge.ubuntu.com/). Though Jono had completed half the chapter, he was keen to add diversity and open the chapter to contributions from the community.

More than one dozen contributors submitted recipes to Jono, which are included in Chapter 6. Other community members pitched in as well. James Stanger explained the basics of printing, and our excellent tech editor, Quim Gil, shared the Guadalinex success story. Jorge O. Castro helped describe Edubuntu, and Dennis Kaarsemaker wrote about using wireless. Matthew East joined the tech editors to offer valuable feedback on the entire book.

Ubuntu is by its very nature a community-driven, collaborative platform, and the development of this book has been inspired and driven by this process. This is why the book is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license and why some chapters (Chapters 3, 4, and 7) are actually included with Dapper itself. With this in mind, we hope the content in the book continues to grow and evolve in new areas and bring more and more users over to Ubuntu. It is an exciting time to be a part of Open Source and an exciting time to be a part of Ubuntu.