<preface id="preface">
<title>About This Book</title>
	
	<blockquote><para><quote>Only two things are infinite, the universe 
	and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former.</quote>
	Albert Einstein</para></blockquote>

<sect1 id="acknowledgements">
<title>Acknowledgments</title>
<sect2 id="acknowledgements-joanna"><title>Joanna's acknowledgments</title>
	<para>Many people have helped me with this book, directly or
	indirectly.  I would like to especially thank Matt Welsh for
	inspiration and LDP leadership, Andy Oram for getting me to work
	again with much-valued feedback, Olaf Kirch for showing me that it
	can be done, and Adam Richter at Yggdrasil and others for showing
	me that other people can find it interesting as well.</para>

	<para>Stephen Tweedie, H. Peter Anvin, Remy Card, Theodore
	Ts'o, and Stephen Tweedie have let me borrow their work (and
	thus make the book look thicker and much more impressive):
	a comparison between the xia and ext2 filesystems, the device
	list and a description of the ext2 filesystem. These aren't
	part of the book any more.  I am most grateful for this, and
	very apologetic for the earlier versions that sometimes lacked
	proper attribution.</para>

	<para>In addition, I would like to thank Mark Komarinski for
	sending his material in 1993 and the many system administration
	columns in Linux Journal.  They are quite informative and
	inspirational.</para>

	<para>Many useful comments have been sent by a large number
	of people.  My miniature black hole of an archive doesn't let
	me find all their names, but some of them are, in alphabetical
	order: Paul Caprioli, Ales Cepek, Marie-France Declerfayt,
	Dave Dobson, Olaf Flebbe, Helmut Geyer, Larry Greenfield and
	his father, Stephen Harris, Jyrki Havia, Jim Haynes, York Lam,
	Timothy Andrew Lister, Jim Lynch, Michael J. Micek, Jacob Navia,
	Dan Poirier, Daniel Quinlan, Jouni K Sepp&auml;nen, Philippe Steindl,
	G.B. Stotte.  My apologies to anyone I have forgotten.</para>
</sect2>

<sect2 id="acknowledgements-stephen"><title>Stephen's acknowledgments</title>
	<para>I would like to thank Lars and Joanna for their hard 
	work on the guide.</para>
	
	<para>In a guide like this one there are likely to be at least 
	some minor inaccuracies.  And there are almost certainly going to 
	be sections that become out of date from time to time.  If you 
	notice any of this then please let me know by sending me an email 
	to: <email>bagpuss@debian.org.NOSPAM</email>.	I will take virtually
	any form of input (diffs, just plain text, html, whatever), I am 
	in no way above allowing others to help	me maintain such a large 
	text as this :) </para>
	
	<para>Many thanks to Helen Topping Shaw for getting the red pen out 
	and making the text far better than it would otherwise have been.  
	Also thanks are due just for being wonderful.</para>
</sect2>

<sect2 id="acknowledgements-alex">
<title>Alex's Acknowledgments</title>
	<para>I would like to thank Lars, Joanna, and Stephen for all the 
	great work that they have done on this document over the years.  I
	only hope that my contribution will be worthy of continuing the work
	they started.</para>

	<para>Like the previous maintainers, I openly welcome any comments,
	suggestions, complains, corrections, or any other form of feedback
	you may have.  This document can only benefit from the suggestions 
	of those who use it.</para>
	
	<para>There have been many people who have helped me on my journey
	through the "Windows-Free" world, the person I feel I need to thank the
	most is my first true UN*X mentor, Mike Velasco.  Back in a time before
	SCO became a "dirty word", Mike helped me on the path of tar's, cpio's,
	and many, many man pages.  Thanks Mike! You are the 'Sofa King'.<para>
</sect2>
</sect1>

<sect1 id="revision-hist">
<title>Revision History</title>
	<para>
	<revhistory>
	<revision>
		<revnumber>0.7</revnumber>
		<date>2001-12-03</date>
		<authorinitials>SS</authorinitials>
	</revision>
	<revision>
		<revnumber>0.8</revnumber>
		<date>2003-11-18</date>
		<authorinitials>AW</authorinitials>
		<revdescription><orderedlist spacing='compact'>
			<listitem><simpara>Added a section on NTP
				</simpara></listitem>
			<listitem><simpara>Cleaned some SGML 
				</simpara></listitem>
			<listitem><simpara>Added ext3 to the filesystem 
					section
				</simpara></listitem>
		</orderedlist></revdescription>
	</revision>
	<revision>
		<revnumber>0.9</revnumber>
		<date>  </date>
		<authorinitials>AW</authorinitials>
		<revdescription><orderedlist spacing='compact'>
			<listitem><simpara>Cleaned some SGML code, changed 
					doctype to lds.dsl, and added id tags 
				</simpara></listitem>
			<listitem><simpara>Updated section on filesystem types, 
					and Filesystem comparison 
				</simpara></listitem>
			<listitem><simpara>Updated partition type section
				</simpara></listitem>
			<listitem><simpara>Updated section on creating 
					partitions 
				</simpara></listitem>
			<listitem><simpara>Wrote section on Logical Volume 
					Manager (LVM)
				</simpara></listitem>
			<listitem><simpara>Updated section on space allocation
				</simpara></listitem>
			<listitem><simpara>Added chapter on System Monitoring
				</simpara></listitem>
			<listitem><simpara>Added more command line utilities
				</simpara></listitem>
			<listitem><simpara>Verified Device list
				</simpara></listitem>
			<listitem><simpara>Modified email address for Authors
			 	</simpara></listitem>
			<listitem><simpara>Added references to more in-depth 
					documents where applicable
			 	</simpara></listitem>
			<listitem><simpara>Added notes on upcoming sections
			 	</simpara></listitem>
			<listitem><simpara>Indexed chapters 1 - 4, & part of 5
			 	</simpara></listitem>
			<listitem><simpara>Updated Misc Information throughout 
					the book
				</simpara></listitem>
		</orderedlist></revdescription>
	</revision>
	</revhistory>
</sect1>

<sect1 id="available-versions"> 
<title>Source and pre-formatted versions available</title>
	<para>The source code and other machine readable formats
	of this book can be found on the Internet via anonymous FTP at the
	Linux Documentation Project home page <ulink
	url="http://www.tldp.org/">http://www.tldp.org/</ulink>, or
	at the home page of this book at 
	<ulink url="http://www.draxeman.com/sag.html">
	http://www.draxeman/sag.html</ulink>. This book is available in at 
	least it's SGML source, as well as, HTML and PDF formats.  Other
	formats may be available.</para>
</sect1>

<sect1 id="typo-conventions">
<title>Typographical Conventions</title>

	<para>Throughout this book, I have tried to use uniform
	typographical conventions.  Hopefully they aid readability.  If
	you can suggest any improvements please contact me.</para>

	<para>Filenames are expressed as:
	<filename>/usr/share/doc/foo</filename>.</para>

	<para>Command names are expressed as: <command>fsck</command>

	<para>Email addresses are expressed as:
	<email>user@domain.com</email></para>

	<para>URLs are expressed as: <ulink
	url="http://www.tldp.org">http://www.tldp.org</ulink>
	</para>

	<para>I will add to this section as things come up whilst
	editing.  If you notice anything that should be added then
	please let me know.</para>
</sect1>
</preface>
