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英文版前言

Linux has been garnering strength for a number of years now, and its growing popularity drives more and more users to make the jump. The first step on that path is to pick a distribution. This is an important decision, because each distribution has its own peculiarities, and future migration costs can be avoided if the right choice is made from the start.
Debian GNU/Linux is a “generic” Linux distribution that fits most users. The purpose of this book is to show its many aspects so that you can make an informed decision when choosing.

1. 为什么写这本书?

Linux has gathered a fair amount of media coverage over the years; it mostly benefits the distributions supported by a real marketing department — in other words, company-backed distributions (Ubuntu, Red Hat, SUSE, Mandriva, and so on). But Debian is far from being a marginal distribution; multiple studies have shown over the years that it is widely used both on servers and on desktops. This is particularly true among webservers where Debian is the leading Linux distribution.
本书的目的是帮助您探索这个发行版。做为 Debian 项目的开发者和贡献者,我们希望分享我们自加入到这个项目以来积累的点滴经验(Raphaël自1998年加入,Roland自2000年加入)。运气好的话,我们所热衷的 Debian 将带有交流的性质,可能您有一天也会加入我们……
The first edition of this book (in 2004) served to fill a gaping hole: it was the first French-language book that focused exclusively on Debian. At that time, many other books were written on the topic both for French-speaking and English-speaking readers. Unfortunately almost none of them got updated, and over the years the situation slipped back to one where there were very few good books on Debian. We hope that this book, which has started a new life with its translation into English (and several translations from English into various other languages), will fill this gap and help many users.