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Nothing I have ever written would have been possible without the love, support, and infinite patience of Dorothy Fisher, my wife and best friend. Dorth believed in me on day one, removed several thousand commas from my earliest writing, and has accepted “I can’t do that now— come back in fifteen minutes or six hours” as an excuse more times than anyone should ever be expected to. I am similarly lucky to have great friends like Jeff “Sunshine” Kaminski, Dr. Joe O’Lear, Jim Morgan, and Kim Walter in my life. I heard once that a good friend will come and bail you out of jail, but a true friend will be sitting in jail with you saying, “Man! That was fun!” Luckily, we haven’t had to test that, but I’m sure we’d all look great in orange.

I would also like to thank Carol Long, Tom Dinse, Kit Kemper, and others at Wiley who enabled me to do this book and supported me during its creation. All errors are mine alone, but this would be a much weaker book without your contributions. I quite literally wouldn’t have been able to do it without you.

Finally, this book wouldn’t even exist without people like Linus Torvalds, Mark Shuttleworth, the Ubuntu folks in general, the Debian Project, Richard Stallman, the FSF, and the millions of contributors to the cor- nucopia that is GNU/Linux.