2003年，Nat Makarévitch 联系了 Raphaël，因为他想出版一本关于 Debian 的书，作为他为 Eyrolles －一个法国著名的技术书籍编辑 － 管理的 Cahier de l'Admin（管理员手册）系列丛书之一。Raphaël 立即答应去写这本书。第一版是在2004年10月14日完成的，并且获得了巨大成功 － 仅仅四个月之后就销售一空。
从那以后，我们又发行了这本法语书的其它 7 个版本，每个版本都对应着后续的 Debian 版本（除了 Debian 9 之外）。Roland，刚开始是校对者，后来慢慢地变成了共同执笔人。
我们很显然对本书的成功感到满意，所以也经常希望 Eyrolles 能说服一个国际编辑把它翻译成英文。我们收到海量的评论说本书如何帮助他们开始使用 Debian，所以我们也热衷于让本书以同样的方式造福更多的人。
唉，可惜我们联系过的所有英文编辑都不愿承担风险来翻译并出版本书。不过这种小挫折打不倒我们，我们与我们的法文编辑 Eyrolles 协商，把翻译成英文版的权利拿了回来，然后尝试自己出版发行。感谢一场成功的
众筹活动 ，我们在 2011 年 12 月到 2012 年 5 月之间翻译了本书，《Debian 管理员手册》诞生并以自由软件协议发行！
尽管这是一个重要的里程碑，我们已经意识到了只要我们无法将法文版作为英文版的正式翻译版本，那么故事就不会结束。当时我们还不可能这么做，因为当时法文版书籍仍然由 Eyrolles 使用非自由的许可证商业发行。
In 2013, the release of Debian 7 gave us a good opportunity to discuss a new contract with Eyrolles. We convinced them that a license more in line with the Debian values would contribute to the book's success. That wasn't an easy deal to make, and we agreed to set up another
crowdfunding campaign to cover some of the costs and reduce the risks involved. The operation was again a huge success and in July 2013, we added a French translation to the Debian Administrator's Handbook.
We would like to thank everybody who contributed to these fund-raising campaigns, either by pledging some money or by passing the word around. We couldn't have done it without you.
To save some paper, 5 years after the fund-raising campaigns and after two subsequent editions, we dropped the list of persons who opted to be rewarded with a mention of their name in the book. But their names are engraved in the acknowledgments of the Wheezy edition of the book:
This book would not be what it is without the contributions of several persons who each played an important role during the translation phase and beyond. We would like to thank Marilyne Brun, who helped us to translate the sample chapter and who worked with us to define some common translation rules. She also revised several chapters that were desperately in need of supplementary work. Thank you to Anthony Baldwin (of Baldwin Linguas) who translated several chapters for us.
Since Roland and I were too busy to update the book for Debian 11, we used the modest income that we get through donations and sales to hire contributors to do the bulk of the work. Thank you very much to Jorge Maldonado Ventura and Daniel Leidert for the hard work they put into this update.
我们从校对者那里得到很多帮助，他们是 Daniel Phillips，Gerold Rupprecht，Gordon Dey，Jacob Owens 和 Tom Syroid。他们每个人都校检了很多章节。非常感谢！
Then, once the English version was liberated, of course, we got plenty of feedback and suggestions and fixes from the readers, and even more from the many teams who undertook to translate this book into other languages. Thanks!
我们也要感谢几位法文版的读者，他们给了我们不错的评价，让我们知道我们的翻译是值得的，感谢你们：Christian Perrier，David Bercot，Étienne Liétart 和 Gilles Roussi。Stefano Zacchiroli 是在大集市募捐活动时的 Debian 项目领导人，感谢他支持我们的活动，并解释了为什么自由版权的书是非常重要的。
如果你有幸是在看本书的纸质版，那么你要和我们一起感谢 Benoît Guillon，Jean-Côme Charpentier 和 Sébastien Mengin，他们为书本内页做了设计。Benoît 是
dblatex 的上游作者，我们就是用它来把 DocBook 格式转换成 LaTeX 格式（再转成 PDF 格式）。Sébastien 是创造了这个优美布局的设计师，Jean-Côme 则是把它实现成 dblatex 可用的样式表的 LaTeX 专家。感谢你们的辛勤工作！
最后，感谢 Thierry Stempfel 为每一章带来的精美图片，感谢 Doru Patrascu 的漂亮的封面。
我们对所有翻译者和翻译复查者们表示感谢。你们的工作将 Debian 带到千百万的无法阅读英语的人们手中，价值不可估量。
First off, I would like to thank Nat Makarévitch, who offered me the possibility to write this book and who provided strong guidance during the year it took to get it done. Thank you also to the fine team at Eyrolles, and Muriel Shan Sei Fan in particular. She has been very patient with me, and I learned a lot with her.
The period of the Ulule campaigns were very demanding for me but I would like to thank everybody who helped to make them a success, and in particular the Ulule team who reacted very quickly to my many requests. Thank you also to everybody who promoted the operations. I don't have any exhaustive list (and if I had, it would probably be too long), but I would like to thank a few people who were in touch with me: Joey-Elijah Sneddon and Benjamin Humphrey of OMG! Ubuntu, Florent Zara of LinuxFr.org, Manu of Korben.info, Frédéric Couchet of April.org, Jake Edge of Linux Weekly News, Clement Lefebvre of Linux Mint, Ladislav Bodnar of Distrowatch, Steve Kemp of Debian-Administration.org, Christian Pfeiffer Jensen of Debian-News.net, Artem Nosulchik of LinuxScrew.com, Stephan Ramoin of Gandi.net, Matthew Bloch of Bytemark.co.uk, the team at Divergence FM, Rikki Kite of Linux New Media, Jono Bacon, the marketing team at Eyrolles, and numerous others that I have forgotten (sorry about that).
I would like to address a special thanks to Roland Mas, my co-author. We have been collaborating on this book since the start, and he has always been up to the challenge. And I must say that completing the Debian Administrator's Handbook has been a lot of work…
最后，感谢我的妻子 Sophie。不论是对这本书的工作还是对整个 Debian 的工作她都非常支持我。有太多个日日夜夜，为了在本书上取得一些进展，我不得不把她和两岁的儿子丢在一边。我非常感激她的支持，我知道我能拥有她是多么地幸运。
好吧，Raphaël 把很多我的“对外”感谢都先说了，但我还是要强调我个人对 Eyrolles 的好伙计们的感激，和他们的合作总是那么地愉快而顺畅。希望他们的优秀建议并没有在翻译中被埋没。
我极度感谢 Raphaël 负责了本书英文版的管理部分工作。从组织基金活动到书本布局的最终细节，制作一本译本比翻译和校对要多很多工作，Raphaël 把这些工作都做了（或委派、监督其他人做了）。太感谢了。
也感谢那些对本书或多或少有直接贡献的人们，例如那些提供澄清和解释，或者提供翻译建议的人们。他们太多了不好一一列举，但大多数都能在各个 #debian-* 的 IRC 频道里找到。
当然前面这几部分人里肯定是有重复的，但接下来还是要特别感谢的就是直接在为 Debian 努力的人们。没有他们就不会有这么一本书。Debian 项目作为一个整体能对任何人和所有人开放，对此我至今依然赞叹不已。
更多的个人感谢给予我的朋友们和客户们，我在为这本书努力的时候变得不太响应其他事情，感谢他们的理解，也感谢他们一贯的支持、鼓励和鼓动。是谁你懂的。谢谢。
最后，我确信他们会因为在这里被提到而吃惊，可我还是要把我的感谢再加给 Terry Pratchett，Jasper Fforde，Tom Holt，William Gibson，Neal Stephenson，当然还有已故的 Douglas Adams。无数个小时畅享他们的书，直接使我有能力参与翻译本书并续写新的篇章。
