The Official Ubuntu Book - Softcover

Burger, Corey; Jesse, Jonathan; Krstic, Ivan

3.82

135 ratings by Goodreads

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0132435942 ISBN 13: 9780132435949

Publisher: Peachpit Pr, 2006

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Ubuntu is a complete, free operating system that emphasizes community, support, and ease of use while refusing to compromise on speed, power, and flexibility. It's Linux for human beings--designed for everyone from computer novices to experts. Ubuntu is the most in-demand Linux distribution, and this official guide will get you up and running quickly.

Learn how to seamlessly install and customize Ubuntu for your home or small businesses. Its open source power can be used in schools, government, or by corporations, and is suitable for both desktop and server use. The Ubuntu community is built on the premise that software should be available free of charge, and that people should have the freedom to customize and alter their software in whatever way they see fit.

Written by leading Ubuntu community members, this is the only book that you need to become a savvy Ubuntu user.

Covers the latest version of Ubuntu--Ubuntu 6.06LTS
Covers every standard desktop application from word processing, spreadsheets, Web browsing, e-mail, instant messaging, music, video, and, of course, games, all the way to software development, databases, and other server applications
Includes real-world troubleshooting advice contributed by Ubuntu users from around the world
Learn about the extended Ubuntu community, which includes translators; software developers; teachers; people who love to hand out CDs and help friends try free software; artists; people who write documentation, tips, and guides; accountants; and even a lawyer or two.
Covers both Ubuntu and Kubuntu desktop systems
Explains Ubuntu Server installation and basic administration, complete with advanced installer features like LVM and RAID

This book comes with a version of Ubuntu that can run right off the DVD, as well as the complete set of supported packages for Ubuntu, including Kubuntu. Try out Ubuntu on the DVD. If you want to keep it, install it directly from your desktop.

Community Contributors: James Stanger, Jorge O. Castro, Matthew East, Quim Gil, Dennis Kaarsemaker, David Bain, Alan Barnard, David Clayton, Manu Cornet, Scott Dier, Oskar J�nefors, Jason LaPrade, Avinash Meetoo, Julien Rottenberg, Stephen Sandlin, David Symons, Paul van Genderen, Andrew Zajac

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About the Author:

Benjamin Mako Hill is on the Ubuntu Community Council governance board, and on the founding Ubuntu team with the charge to help grow the Ubuntu development and user community during the first year. With the community off the ground, Mako returned to graduate school at the MIT Media Lab where he works on the One Laptop Per per Child project.

Jono Bacon is an Open Source consultant, speaker, and writer living in the United Kingdom. Jono spends his days helping people to move to Open Source and speaks at conferences around the world about Open Source and its community

Corey Burger is a member of the Ubuntu Documentation Team, the Laptop Testing Team, and has been involved with Ubuntu since December 2004. As leader of Ubuntu Canada, he works to promote Ubuntu to individuals and organizations across Canada.

Jonathan Jesse is a member of the Kubuntu Documents Team, works on bugs for the Kubuntu team, tests builds for the Laptop Testing Team, and helps out on the wiki as well.

Ivan Krstić is one of the Ubuntu Server Team administrators and has previously served as director of research at the Medical Informatics Laboratory at Zagreb Children's Hospital, where he depended on Ubuntu Server for mission-critical backend tasks. He is now developing software architecture for the One Laptop Per Child project

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 ways—much 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.

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