The Debian Administrator's Handbook

After the initial crowd-funding campaign, we set April as a target date for the release of the book. April is almost over so it’s time for us to give you some news.

First, we’re very happy to announce that the liberation fund has been completed and thus the book will be released under free licenses (GPL2+ + CC-BY-SA 3.0) from the start.

The liberation campaign was slowly loosing momentum in the last months but we had the chance to have two significant donations from BackTrack Linux first (1000 EUR) and then from École Ouverte Francophone (1442 EUR) which completed the fund. Thank you to them and to all the individuals who contributed in the last few months (387 persons!).

If you haven’t seen it yet on our Google+ page or on Raphaël’s blog, have a look at the nice cover for the book:

While the book cover has been ready for a few weeks, the book itself is not yet ready. We still have a last batch of reviews to process and we’re not done yet with the LaTeX stylesheet used to render the PDF for the printed book (we’re using dblatex for this).

If nothing unexpected happens, you can expect the book release in the next 2-3 weeks. This time we must make it, because I (Raphaël) have planned a one-week vacation after!

The crowfunding campaign on Ulule ended on November 28th. With 673 supporters, we raised 24345 EUR. Of those, 14935 EUR have been put in the liberation fund and the rest corresponds to the various pre-orders and rewards offered.

This means that the translation will happen (we just started) but that the book is currently not going to be released under a free license. Don’t despair… As planned, the liberation campaign is carried on until the 25 K€ target is reached!

Instead of being hosted on Ulule, this permanent campaign is on the project website at debian-handbook.info/liberation/. Note that any contribution of 10 EUR or more means that you get a copy of the ebook as soon as it’s available (even if the liberation target is not reached).

Make sure to benefit from this as when the book will be available for sale, this will no longer be true. The contribution to the liberation will be whatever you accept to give on top of the book’s public price.

The campaign for the liberation of the Debian Administrator’s Handbook has been going for more than a month. 450 persons already support the project because they know the French Book or because they trust us to do a good work.

Now you no longer need to trust us, you can judge by yourself by reading one complete chapter titled “Maintenance and Updates: The APT Tools”.

With its 26 pages of knowledge on the APT family of tools, you should be able to make up your mind on the quality of the content. You can decide whether it’s really worth the few euros requested to liberate it!

Click here to get your free sample chapter

If you’re eager to discover what else you can learn in the book, check out the full table of contents.

Then click here to head over to the crowdfunding page and make sure to order your copy of the book and to contribute to its liberation. Thank you!

Google+ tends to be very popular in the free software community. That’s why when Google announced that it’s now possible to create “pages” for your favorite product/company/organization/etc., we immediately wanted to try it out with The Debian Administrator’s Handbook.

Click here to discover the Google+ page for “The Debian Administrator’s Handbook”

Thanks to everybody, we managed to secure the base funding required for the translation to happen. The 15 K€ target has been reached with 380 supporters. This is really an important milestone and we’re glad to be there already.

But as initially announced, this is only the first step in this project. We really want to liberate the book and the requirement for this to happen is that the liberation fund reaches 25 K€. Out of the 15 K€ pledged so far, 8771 € have been put in the liberation fund. This means that we’re at 35% of this second target, but we’re approaching the middle of this crowdfunding campaign! So we’re a bit behind in terms of timing.

That’s why we really count on you to promote this campaign. As usual, you can share the link to your friends, blog about it, etc. But more than this, you can put some advertisement in your signature on forums, mailing lists, and so on. Here are some ready to use signatures for you:

Liberate The Debian Administrator’s Handbook:
http://debian-handbook.info/go/ulule/

Pre-order a copy of the Debian Administrator’s Handbook and help
liberate it: http://debian-handbook.info/go/ulule/

Help liberate a Debian bestseller: http://debian-handbook.info/go/ulule/

If you want, you can replace the link with one of the special links below so that a part of the money raised goes to Debian or Ubuntu. The corresponding links are http://debian-handbook.info/go/ulule-debian/ and http://debian-handbook.info/go/ulule-ubuntu/.

Thank you all!

Almost a year has elapsed since I announced the project on my blog. Unfortunately real life and the Squeeze release made it impossible for me to restart the project sooner.

But this time, we’re getting closer: the Debian Administrator’s Handbook has now its dedicated website: http://debian-handbook.info.

This is hopefully the start of a long journey. The next step is to setup the fundraising on ulule.com that will enable us to complete the translation of the book.

But if we want the fundraising to be a success we will have to convince a lot of people to participate. This means that we need your help to spread the news once it’s live. Do you have ideas on how to best promote the event? Do you know how to reach a large number of persons using Debian or a Debian-based distribution? If yes, please get in touch with me.

Thank you in advance for your help. Now I’m going back to preparing the marketing material for the fundraising.