Contents. Nothing I have ever written would have been possible without the love, support, and infinite patience of Dorothy Fisher

Nothing I have ever written would have been possible without the love, support, and infinite patience of Dorothy Fisher, my wife and best friend. Dorth believed in me on day one, removed several thousand commas from my earliest writing, and has accepted “I can’t do that now— come back in fifteen minutes or six hours” as an excuse more times than anyone should ever be expected to. I am similarly lucky to have great friends like Jeff “Sunshine” Kaminski, Dr. Joe O’Lear, Jim Morgan, and Kim Walter in my life. I heard once that a good friend will come and bail you out of jail, but a true friend will be sitting in jail with you saying, “Man! That was fun!” Luckily, we haven’t had to test that, but I’m sure we’d all look great in orange.

I would also like to thank Carol Long, Tom Dinse, Kit Kemper, and others at Wiley who enabled me to do this book and supported me during its creation. All errors are mine alone, but this would be a much weaker book without your contributions. I quite literally wouldn’t have been able to do it without you. Finally, this book wouldn’t even exist without people like Linus Torvalds, Mark Shuttle worth, the Ubuntu folks in general, the Debian Project, Richard Stallman, the FSF, and the millions of contributors to the cornucopia that is GNU/Linux.

Xxi

A Linux distribution is basically the sum of the things that you need to run Linux on your computer. There are many different Linux distributions, each with their own target audience, set offeatures, administrative tools, and fan club, the latter of which is more properly known as a usercommunity. Putting aside the downright fanatics, most of the members of the user community for anyLinux distribution are people who just happen to find themselves using a distribution for one reason oranother. These reasons range from what they’ve heard from friends, what CD or DVD came with a Linuxmagazine that they bought; to what Linux book they happened to buy.Ubuntu Linux is the most exciting Linux distribution in years. Ironically, while Ubuntu itself is indeednew, it also comes with a respectable Linux pedigree. Ubuntu has direct roots in one of the oldest andbest-known Linux distributions available, the Debian GNU/Linux distribution. The folks who initiallycreated and supported Ubuntu, Canonical Ltd., started out as Debian fans who wanted a faster-moving,

more up-to-date distribution than Debian provided. So, in the spirit of Linux and the Open Source movement, they made their own distribution, Ubuntu Linux, by incorporating the best of Debian, other Linux distributions and open source applications, and added their own special sauce.

Ubuntu means “humanity to others.” For the people who use and bring you Ubuntu Linux, this is not just a name with touchy-feely overtones. The special sauce in Ubuntu is a social and business commitment to Ubuntu users everywhere. Ubuntu releases occur regularly, every six months, and support and updates for any Ubuntu release are available for a minimum of eighteen months after that. More about that it in the first chapter, where you’ll read more about Ubuntu, its philosophy, its community, and why the sum of those makes Ubuntu different than any other Linux distribution.

In a nutshell, Ubuntu is a Linux distribution for people. While reading this book, you’ll see that there are plenty of excellent technical reasons for using Ubuntu, even if you’re a hard-core Linux propeller head. However, that’s not the point of Ubuntu—Ubuntu is for people who want to use their computers and need a solid software foundation for doing so. Whether your focus is on writing code or surfing the Web, sending and receiving electronic mail, working with your digital photographs, watching DVDs, listening to music, and so on, Ubuntu offers the software that you need to do what you want to do.

Like any Linux distribution, you can freely download and install Ubuntu, but it gets even better. This book includes a CD of the latest Ubuntu Desktop CD at the time this book was published, but new versions may be available by the time you buy the book. If you don’t have access to a CD burner, need a version of Ubuntu for a non-x86 system, or simply don’t have the time, the Ubuntu folks will send you CDs that you can either use to install or test-drive Ubuntu on your current computer system. That’s more than free—it’s revolutionary! Downloadable copies of Linux distributions are nothing new, but sending people physical CDs if they need them shows that Ubuntu Linux is more than just another Linux distribution— the Ubuntu folks are Linux devotees on a mission. And you and I are the lucky winners.

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