Well, here it is: ``Linux Installation and Getting Started''. 
This book is a complete guide to installing and using Linux, even
for the UNIX novice. 

Almost everything is here: in the future, I plan to expand Chapter 6
and possibly add information on releases other than SLS.

...Whoa. Did you just say releases OTHER than SLS? That's right.
After months of wrestling back and forth with this book, something
occurred to me. Today I was ready to finally release the final version
of this book. Then I get mail from Peter MacDonald. The new version
of SLS is out, and I have to rewrite portions of the book to keep up 
with it.

In other words, I don't have time to document and keep track of every
release of Linux, let alone SLS. For now, this book will focus on SLS,
because so many people use it. I don't want to hear arguments about
whether SLS is better than other releases: If you want this guide to 
cover releases other than SLS, please write the relevant sections and
send them to me. You will notice that I left the framework in place
to include other releases, under the "release" directory in the source.
For this version, however, it's SLS only. It saves me a lot of time
only having to deal with a single release. SLS is very stable. But
all of the other releases have such different and varied installation
methods. 

See the file TODO for a list of things to do. If you feel like writing
ANY of the missing sections, feel free! Just let me know before you begin,
in case someone else is working on the same thing.

The format is simple: every chapter has a subdirectory (except for 
the appendices, they all live together under appendix/). Release-specific
information is isolated from the rest of the doc, for easier handling.
To format the doc, simply do "latex gs" in the toplevel directory; you
may need to do it twice to get the cross-references right. You'll be 
left with "gs.dvi", which you can convert to PostScript with "dvips gs". 

When LaTeXing the source, there are a number of Underfull \hbox warnings.
You can ignore them---it's just because I have \sloppy turned on because
of very.long.host.names:followed-by/very/long/filenames. 

Amazingly enough, I have hacked in ASCII support. Running "latex gs-ascii"
will get you "gs-ascii.dvi", which looks surprisingly good when processed
with "dvi2tty" (which generates ASCII preview from DVI). The style file
"linuxdoc-ascii" is used for the ASCII version, which replaces some macros
to make dvi2tty output look better. Still, I had to fix a lot of it by
hand, and get rid of all of those pesky formfeed characters (which 
correspond to the pages in the original document, not the pages if you print 
the ASCII). In all it took about an hour of by-hand fixing. 

Of course, running LaTeX on gs-ascii.dvi generates a huge number of
Overful \hboxes. Again, those can be ignored: For ASCII, I had to
set \textwidth to 4 inches. 

Within the LaTeX source you will see the use of the \igsascii definition.
When set to 1, \igsascii means that the document will be processed as
gs-ascii.tex. When set to 0, \igsascii means that it will be processed as
gs.tex. In this way, I can "ifdef out" sections of the document which
don't look good with ASCII (such as the vi tutorial, for example). The
construct

   \ifodd\igsascii { ASCII version here } \else { Normal version here } \fi

is used to accomplish this.


Please send me any corrections, updates, additions, flames, money, etc.
For changes: I really prefer to get general overview comments, broad
suggestions. This allows me to rewrite the rough parts myself. If
I just apply cdiffs from you and I don't like the way something is
changed, it means more by-hand fixing. Some of these sections still
need some work, so if you'd just nudge me in the right direction I'll
be grateful. Thanks.

Matt Welsh, 24 July 1993
<mdw@tc.cornell.edu>
