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”

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!

But we’re now ready and we just launched the fundraising campaign on Ulule.com since that ended up being the preferred option in the poll we ran last year.

Click here to head over to our Ulule project page and make a pledge to support this project.

Roland and me are both excited by the experience. This crowdfunding project is a bit different since we actually have two targets: the first one at €15000 is the absolute minimum to make this project a reality, the second one at €25000 in what we call the “liberation fund” is the minimum required to get the resulting book published under a license compatible with the Debian Free Software Guidelines.

Since we’re lacking a good DFSG-free book about Debian, this is a great opportunity to improve the situation and bring Debian to more people thanks to this book.

On top of this, when you support this project you can select a reward that goes from a copy of the ebook to a dinner with the authors (only 10 places for the latter)! Among the other rewards, there’s obviously a paperback version of the book, but also an individual one-hour mentoring session with Raphaël Hertzog… a nice way to get you hooked as a new Debian contributor (limited to 40 persons, don’t miss the opportunity!).

Wait no longer, click here and pledge some money to bring this reference book to Debian and the rest of the world.

We also need your help to spread the news and get as many supporters as possible. Share the link with your friends, write an article on your blog, put a widget on your website, etc. Thank you very much!

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.