Our look is the result of reader comments, our own experimentation, and feedback from distribution channels. Distinctive covers complement our distinctive approach to technical topics, breathing personality and life into potentially dry subjects. The image on the cover of Linux Device Drivers is of a bucking horse. A colorful description of this appears in Marvels of the New West: A Vivid Portrayal of the Stupendous Marvels in the Vast Wonderland West of the Missouri River, by William Thayer (The Henry Bill Publishing Co., Norwich, CT, 1888). Thayer quotes a stockman, who gives this description of a bucking horse: "When a horse bucks he puts his head down between his legs, arches his back like an angry cat, and springs into the air with all his legs at once, coming down again with a frightful jar, and he sometimes keeps on repeating the performance until he is completely worn out with the excursion. The rider is apt to feel rather worn out too by that time, if he has kept his seat, which is not a very easy matter, especially if the horse is a real scientific bucker, and puts a kind of side action into every jump. The double girth commonly attached to these Mexican saddles is useful for keeping the saddle in its place during one of those bouts, but there is no doubt that they frequently make a horse buck who would not do so with a single girth. With some animals you can never draw up the flank girth without setting them bucking." Darren Kelly was the production editor, Cynthia Kogut was the copyeditor, and Susan Carlson Greene was the proofreader for Linux Device Drivers, Second Edition . Catherine Morris and Claire Cloutier provided quality control. Judy Hoer wrote the index. Matt Hutchinson, Lucy Muellner, and Joe Wizda provided production support.

Edie Freedman designed the cover of this book. The cover image is a 19th-century engraving from the Dover Pictorial Archive. Emma Colby produced the cover layout with QuarkXPress 4.1, using Adobe's ITC Garamond font.

David Futato designed the interior layout based on a series design by Nancy Priest. Chapter opener images are taken from the Dover Pictorial Archive, the book Marvels of the New West: A Vivid Portrayal of the Stupendous Marvels in the Vast Wonderland West of the Missouri River (by William M. Thayer, The Henry Bill Publishing Company, Norwich, CT, 1888), and The Pioneer History of America: A Popular Account of the Heroes and Adventures (by Augustus Lynch Mason, A.M., The Jones Brothers Publishing Company, Cincinnati, OH, 1884). The print version of this book was created by translating the DocBook XML markup of its source files into a set of gtroff macros, using a filter developed at O'Reilly & Associates by Norman Walsh. Steve Talbott designed and wrote the underlying macro set on the basis of the GNU troff –gs macros; Lenny Muellner adapted them to XML and implemented the book design. The GNU groff text formatter version 1.11.1 was used to generate PostScript output. The text and heading fonts are ITC Garamond Light and Garamond Book. The illustrations that appear in the book were produced by Robert Romano and Jessamyn Read using Macromedia FreeHand 9 and Adobe Photoshop 6.