Having done that, we were left in the odd situation where we had a free translation of a proprietary book. Now, together with Eyrolles, we have setup a new project to publish the French book under a free license and contribute it back to the Debian Administrator’s Handbook as the official French translation.

The French book played a major role in my life and I would love to see it published under a free license (GPL-2+ / CC-BY-SA 3.0 just like the English book) and to give it the bright future that it deserves.

The Debian Administrator’s Handbook wouldn’t exist without the original book… so please consider supporting this project. This last step is an important one for me, I count on you.

Now head over there: http://www.ulule.com/liberation-cahier-admin-debian/

Thank you again for your support!

You can browse the Spanish book online, and download it directly from the main download page.

The book is based on Debian Squeeze as the Wheezy update is not done yet.

Join me to thank all the translators who made this possible:

• Matías Bellone
• Isma De Andrés Presa
• Ricardo Mendoza
• Iván Alemán
• Marcos Mezo
• Norman Garcia
• Tzihue Cisneros Perez
• Dario Java
• José David Calderón Serrano
• Roger Orellana

By the way other translations need your help to reach completion as well!

The process we’ll use

I have setup a TODO list for Roland and I. Each of us is going to update half of the book. As the work progresses, we will regularly push updated versions of the book here: http://debian-handbook.info/browse/wheezy/

That way you can review the content as it evolves and submit bug reports to further improve the book! Bug reports must be submitted via reportbug debian-handbook just like any other Debian bug report.

I will keep you informed (on this blog) after each significant update (i.e. when a chapter has been fully updated).

Funding the work to update the book

This is also an important milestone for the project. We managed to fund the translation and the liberation of the book with the initial campaign but now we must ensure that sales of printed copies and donations cover for the time we’re going to spend in the next few months to update the book.

And this is indeed a concern because while the volume of sales and donations has been significant during the first 2-3 months after the liberation, it quickly dried up and we’re now down to about 100 EUR of revenues per month for each of Roland and I. This is much less than what we hoped for given the (potential) audience of the book. It’s already not enough to compensate for the time we spend on the book and it’s far from being enough to be able to fund our other free software activities.

This means multiple things:

1. We must promote the book a bit more, and we need your help. Please share the word about the book, write some reviews on your blog and keep us informed!
2. Please consider donating a few euros to prove that a free book can be financially viable in the long run.
3. Alternatively, you can help one of the translation teams so that the book reaches an even wider audience than today.

Thank you very much for your continued support!

PS: In case you wonder, even though the book is now under a free license, we only got two small contributions besides typo fixes and translations. So it looks like that this book update will only happen if we take care of it ourselves.

Even if the translations are not complete, I decided to publish their work in progress on-line. It’s always rewarding to be able to see the result of your hard work and hopefully it can also motivate other people to join the translations teams.

So here you go, have a look at the work of all the translators:

• Arabic
• Chinese
• Danish
• German
• Greek
• Italian
• Portuguese (Brazil)
• Romanian
• Spanish
• Turkish

Last week, I have written some instructions for translators. You can find README.translators and README.git in the Git repository.

So if you’re interested to help translate the book to your native language, read those files and join the dedicated mailing list (debian-handbook-translators@lists.alioth.debian.org). You can either join a pre-existing translation team or start a new one.

Right now (2012-05-31), the following translations have already started:

• Chinese
• Italian
• Spanish

We also contacted persons who (at some point) volunteered to help for the following translations:

• Brazilian Portuguese
• Czech
• Dutch
• German
• Greek
• Japanese
• Polish
• Romanian
• Turkish

Do you like challenges? For any translation that reaches 100%, we will try to organize a print version of the book as well.

Looking forward to talk with you on the mailing list.

The paperback’s usual price is €44.90, but we decided to make a special deal for the launch. You can get it with a 10% discount until May 18th. Hurry up and get it from Lulu.com.

The ebook is available for immediate download on the book’s website. There’s the PDF file corresponding to the printed book but also an EPUB version suitable for smartphones and ebook readers. You can also find a Mobipocket version for Kindle and other ebook readers that do not support EPUB (the open standard).

And of course, you can read it online.

Since the book is released under a set of free licenses (GPL-2+ / CC-BY-SA 3.0), it’s already available in Debian Unstable, just apt-get install debian-handbook. There’s also a git repository (git clone git://anonscm.debian.org/debian-handbook/debian-handbook.git) if you want to contribute.

We hope that you will enjoy the book and we’re eagerly awaiting your feedback (but don’t expect quick replies, I’m going to take a much needed one-week vacation).

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!

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.

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!

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