The Documentation Project, or LDP, is a loose team of writers, proofreaders, and editors who are working together to provide complete documentation for the operating system. The overall coordinator of the project is Matt Welsh, who is heavily aided by Lars Wirzenius and Michael K. Johnson.
This manual is one in a set of several being distributed by the LDP, including a Linux Users' Guide, System Administrators' Guide, Network Administrators' Guide, and Kernel Hackers' Guide. These manuals are all available in LaTeX source format, .dvi format, and postscript output by anonymous FTP from nic.funet.fi, in the directory /pub/OS/Linux/doc/doc-project, and from tsx-11.mit.edu, in the directory /pub/linux/docs/guides.
We encourage anyone with a penchant for writing or editing to join us in improving Linux documentation. If you have Internet e-mail access, you can join the DOC channel of the Linux-Activists mailing list by sending mail to
with the line
in the header or as the first line of the message body.