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. Edie Freedman designed the cover of Running Linux. The cover image, of a rider on a bucking horse, is adapted from a 19th-century engraving from 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." The cover layout was produced with Quark XPress 3.3 and Adobe Photoshop 2.5 software, using the ITC Garamond Condensed font.

The interior layouts were designed by Edie Freedman and Jennifer Niederst, with modifications by Nancy Priest and Mary Jane Walsh. Chapter opening graphics are from the Dover Pictorial Archive and Marvels of the New West . Interior fonts are Adobe ITC Garamond and Adobe Courier. Text was prepared in SGML using the DocBook 2.1 DTD. The print version of this book was created by translating the SGML source into a set of gtroff macros using a filter developed at ORA by Norman Walsh. Steve Talbott designed and wrote the underlying macro set on the basis of the GNU gtroff -gs macros; Lenny Muellner adapted them to SGML and implemented the book design. The GNU groff text formatter version 1.09 was used to generate PostScript output.

The illustrations that appear in the book were created in Macromedia Freehand 5.0 by Chris Reilley.