I have read the first edition (from 1994?). That one helped a lot.

What i liked about it was that it was not distribution specific.
Especially when i had problems with X, i turned to thist book and it told me how to write a configuration file for XFree86. I boorowed this book from a friend and i decided to by the second edition. But now i am confused. I would rather wait for the 3. edition but if that one is distribuiton specific then i'd rrather by the second edition.

I run either small ditribuitins like Trinux( www.trinux.org) for its security tools or Debian (www.debian.org).

I would find it sad if O'Reilly neglected Debian or made "Running Linux" ,3. edition valuable to only those distrubutions using RPM. As i said earlier : I would like a book that concentrated on "hacking" Linux, one that went under the hood, so that when things go wrong you could get the information you needed to edit configuration files for hand and compiling from sourcecode.