2003年，為了出版與 Debian 相關的書Cahier de l'Admin (Admin's Handbook)，在知名的法國出版社 Eyrolles 擔任編輯的 Nat Makarévitch 主動與 Raphaël 連繫。 Raphaël 立即答應撰寫此書。第一版是在2004年10月14日上市相當成功 — 4個月內銷售一空。

Since then, we have released 7 other editions of the French book, one for each subsequent Debian release (except for Debian 9). Roland, who started working on the book as a proofreader, gradually became its co-author.

我們對本書的成功感到滿意，所以也經常希望 Eyrolles 能找人它譯成英文。我們收到海量的評論說本書如何幫助他們開始使用 Debian，所以我們也熱衷於讓本書以同樣的方式造福更多的人。

Alas, no English-speaking editor that we contacted was willing to take the risk of translating and publishing the book. Not put off by this small setback, we negotiated with our French editor Eyrolles and got back the necessary rights to translate the book into English and publish it ourselves. Thanks to a successful crowdfunding campaign, we worked on the translation between December 2011 and May 2012. The “Debian Administrator's Handbook” was born and it was published under a free-software license!

While this was an important milestone, we already knew that the story would not be over for us until we could contribute the French book as an official translation of the English book. This was not possible at that time because the French book was still distributed commercially under a non-free license by Eyrolles.

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.

從校對者得到很多幫助：Daniel Phillips、Gerold Rupprecht、Gordon Dey、Jacob Owens 和 Tom Syroid。他們每個人都檢視多個章節。非常感謝！

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!

也要感謝法文版的讀者給了不錯的評價確認翻譯是值得的：感謝你們 Christian Perrier、David Bercot、Étienne Liétart 和 Gilles Roussi。 Stefano Zacchiroli — 是群眾募資料時的 Debian 計畫領導者 — 值得大大的感謝，解釋了自由 (真的自由) 圖書是非常必需的。

如果您有幸閱讀印本，那麼要感謝 Benoît Guillon、Jean-Côme Charpentier 和 Sébastien Mengin 為書本內頁做了設計。 Benoît 是 dblatex 的上游作者 — 用它來把 DocBook 格式轉換成 LaTeX 格式 (再轉成 PDF 格式)。Sébastien 是此優美佈局的設計師而Jean-Côme 則是 LaTeX 專家以 dblatex 把它轉換為可用的樣式表 。感謝你們的辛勤工作！

最後，感謝 Thierry Stempfel 為每一章帶來的精美圖片，感謝 Doru Patrascu 的漂亮封面。

Ever since the book has been freed, many volunteers have been busy translating it to numerous languages, such as Arabic, Brazilian Portuguese, German, Italian, Spanish, Japanese, Norwegian Bokmål, etc. Discover the full list of translations on the book's website: https://debian-handbook.info/get/#other

感謝譯者及其校閱者。您的努力把 Debian 帶給數百萬無法閱讀英文的人。

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…

最後但不是最不重要，謝謝內人，Sophie。他支持我寫這本書也支持我用 Debian。常常拋下他們母子三人 (夜以繼日) 就為了寫書。感謝他的支持並知道自己很幸運擁有他。

好吧，Raphaël 把很多我的 ‘對外’ 的感謝都先說了。但還是要強調個人對 Eyrolles 的好伙伴們的感激，和他們的合作總是那麼地愉快而順暢。希望他們的優秀建議並沒有在翻譯中被埋沒。

我極度感謝 Raphaël 負責英文版的管理工作。從組織募款活動到書本版面的細節，製作一本譯本比翻譯和校對要多很多工作，Raphaël 把這些工作都做了 (或委派、監督其他人做了)。太感謝了。

也感謝那些對本書直接貢獻的人，例如那些提供澄清和解釋、或者提供翻譯建議。他們多到不勝枚舉，但都能在各個 #debian-* 的 IRC 頻道裡找到。

當然前面這幾部分的人肯定有重複的，但接下來還是要特別感謝直接為 Debian 努力的。沒有他們就沒洧這本書， Debian 作為一個對任何人和所有人開放計畫，至今我依然讚歎不已。

更多的感謝給予我的朋友和客戶，感謝他們諒解我為了這本書而不太理會其他事情，也感謝他們一貫的支持、鼓勵和鼓動。是誰你懂的；謝謝。

最後；我要謝謝那些被我提及而吃驚的人，還是要把我的感謝加給 Terry Pratchett、Jasper Fforde、Tom Holt、William Gibson、Neal Stephenson，與已故的 Douglas Adams。無止盡地享受他們的書使我有能力直接翻譯本書並續寫新的篇章。