Des de fa ja uns anys, el Linux ha anat adquirint cada cop més força, i la seva encara creixent popularitat duu a cada cop més usuaris a fer el salt. La primera passa en aquest camí és el triar una distribució. Aquesta és una decisió important perquè cadascuna té les seves peculiaritats i una tria correcta des del principi pot evitar futurs costos de migració.
Debian GNU/Linux és una distribució de Linux «genèrica» que s'ajusta a la majoria d'usuaris. El propòsit d'aquest llibre és mostrar les seves nombroses vessants de manera que puguis prendre una decisió fonamentada a l'hora de triar.
1. Per què aquest llibre?
Linux has gathered a fair amount of media coverage over the years and is immensely growing, driven for example by the spreading use of virtual servers, cloud and embedded systems, and the use of artificial intelligence; it mostly benefits the distributions supported by a real marketing department — in other words, company-backed distributions (Ubuntu, Red Hat, SUSE, and so on). But Debian is far from being a marginal distribution; multiple studies have shown over the years that it is widely used both on servers and on desktops. This is particularly true among web servers where Debian and Ubuntu are the leading Linux distributions.
The purpose of this book is to help you discover this distribution. We hope to share the experience that we have gathered since we joined the project as developers and contributors in 1998 (Raphaël), 2000 (Roland), and 2003 (Daniel). With any luck, our enthusiasm will be contagious, and maybe you will join us sometime…
The first edition of this book (in 2004) served to fill a gaping hole: it was the first French-language book that focused exclusively on Debian. At that time, many other books were written on the topic both for French-speaking and English-speaking readers. Unfortunately, almost none of them got updated, and over the years the situation slipped back to one where there were very few good books on Debian. We hope that this book, which has started a new life with its translation into English (and several translations from English into various other languages), will fill this gap and help many users.
