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Blano writes "Marc Liyanage recently posted a great article on getting up and running and optimizing OpenOffice.org on Mac OS X. He includes some tweaks and helpful configuration tips." Another option is getting the software on CD.

Digital Dharma writes "Excellent! FreeBSD 4.9 has been released, and if it's anything like the RC series, this will be a release to remember. You can obtain it from the usual sources, or if you're feeling generous and supportive, you can buy the cd set. Support your local Daemon!" As Jani Laaksonen writes, the new release includes "numerous security advisory fixes, kernel changes and support for the Physical Address Extensions (PAE) capability on Intel Pentium Pro and higher processors (see page(4)). This release also adds support for a few more hardware NIC cards, ipfw network protocol enhancements, userland changes, and more. Check FreeBSD 4.9 Release Notes for more information."

doom writes "There seems to be some interest just now in technical books based on freely licensed content, so I thought I would discuss the Dossier series from Rich Morin's Prime Time Freeware project." Doom has provided an overview of this series; read on below to find out for yourself why he says man pages and other free documentation are worth paying for in dead-tree format. Prime Time Freeware Manual: the Dossier Series author (Various) pages (Various) publisher Dossier/Prime Time Freeware rating 8 reviewer doom ISBN (N/A) summary Free documentation worth paying for.

You're all of course aware that there's a huge quantity of excellent technical material on-line about the free/open software that you use ... but how much of it have you actually read? Computer's being what they are -- noisy glowing bulky contraptions with awkward physical controls and displays with a resolution a fraction of paper publications -- most of us aren't inclined to read long works on line. So the next step is where you resolve to do printouts of some of the manuals... and then you discover how long they really are. Many a project can fill multiple looseleaf binders with a single-sided printout of its docs. But if you spend about half a day on it you can probably figure out how to get a nice double-sided printout in a smallish typeface and squeeze it all into a single looseleaf binder... which turns out to *still* be too bulky to want to carry around with you. RTFM is easier said ...

The solution to this is of course professionally printed editions of the manuals. These have been easy to get for GNU software for some time -- the GNU Project standardized on documentation in 'texinfo' format which they use to generate both their online documentation and a very good series of books.

But all that is free is not GNU, and filling that gap is one of the goals of the Dossier series, which uses some semi-automated procedures to generate high-quality, up-to-date hardcopy-on-demand publication.

Thus far they've got books out on the following topics (available on-line through the BSD Mall):

• C, etc.: Essential Tools
• Email: Exim 3
• Email: Mail and Sendmail
• File Systems: FreeBSD
• File Systems: RedHat
• Kernel: FreeBSD
• PostgreSQL: Programming
• PostgreSQL: Reference Manual
• PostgreSQL: Use and Administration
• Processes: FreeBSD
• Processes: RedHat
• Python: Library Reference
• Python: Miscellanea
• Security: Local System
• Security: Remote Access
• Text Processing: Essential Tools
• User Commands: FreeBSD
• User Commands: RedHat

Some of the prices might seem a little high for works based on free content (usually $30 to $35 per volume), but on the other hand these are for small press runs without much in the way of economies of scale going for them. And it certainly beats messing with doing print-outs yourself. (Though if you want to go that route, Dossier can help take the sting out of that process: they offer online access to PDF versions of these works, which is much more inexpensive than paying them to ship you bound volumes.)

When I first heard about Prime Time Freeware/Dossier, I immediately ordered the Postgresql documentation, a set which fills three volumes. At that time the only Postgresql book out was Bruce Momjian's which only covered up to version 7.0. At the speed the postgresql development team was working, having docs more than one release behind was definitely a problem (outer joins weren't even supported in 7.0!). I really appreciated having some books I could flip through that discussed the actual state of the software (and man, there are some weird features in there I didn't know about ... graphical data types so that you can try and use postgres as a backend to a CAD system?).

Next I started looking at the volume on "Text" (now renamed "Text Processing" ... which is a shame, in my opinion. I thought it was really funny putting "Text" on the same level as "C" and "Python"). This is a book I would have liked to have some years ago when I needed to understand troff/nroff for man-page hacking (the only time I ever bought one of those 4-inch-wide junk books the 80s were buried under was to get a copy of "UNIX UNLEASHED" because it had a table of *roff commands ... it still bugs me that I had to do that).

One of the things that struck me immediately about this "Text" volume though, was that there were some utilities discussed here that I'd never heard of before, e.g. a2ps which has some decent features for formatting docs for postscript printers. I'd never run across it before, in part because it wasn't installed by default on my RedHat 7.x box. It's a pretty funky command that does a bunch of things automagically that are sometimes hard to predict, but if you need printouts of some docs, I recommend giving a2ps a try for double-column duplex output -- but only if you can't get them from some place like Dossier (yet).

Rich Morin has been working on the problem of making it easier for users of open systems to get information about them for some time, hence The Meta Project, which thus far has resulted in "Meta Demo," aka the FreeBSD Browser. The Dossier series is a spin-off of this research in documenting open systems... check-out the Meta Project sometime. (I'd like to see that system browser extended to cover Linux, myself).

Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.

Chris Coleman writes "With the publication of this month's online ezine, Daemon News is now 4 years old! Since it's our birthday, we decided to invite the slashdot crowd over for a little birthday bash. We have a special coupon code for slashdot readers that will entitle them to a 40% discount on the latest releases of BSD CDs. So you can see for yourself why BSD isn't dying. Pickup FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, or Darwin and enter 'happybday' as the coupon code when you checkout. [This won't last long.]"

Chris Coleman writes "With the publication of this month's online ezine, Daemon News is now 4 years old! Since it's our birthday, we decided to invite the slashdot crowd over for a little birthday bash. We have a special coupon code for slashdot readers that will entitle them to a 40% discount on the latest releases of BSD CDs. So you can see for yourself why BSD isn't dying. Pickup FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, or Darwin and enter 'happybday' as the coupon code when you checkout. [This won't last long.]"

Chris Coleman writes "With the publication of this month's online ezine, Daemon News is now 4 years old! Since it's our birthday, we decided to invite the slashdot crowd over for a little birthday bash. We have a special coupon code for slashdot readers that will entitle them to a 40% discount on the latest releases of BSD CDs. So you can see for yourself why BSD isn't dying. Pickup FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, or Darwin and enter 'happybday' as the coupon code when you checkout. [This won't last long.]"

Chris Coleman writes "With the publication of this month's online ezine, Daemon News is now 4 years old! Since it's our birthday, we decided to invite the slashdot crowd over for a little birthday bash. We have a special coupon code for slashdot readers that will entitle them to a 40% discount on the latest releases of BSD CDs. So you can see for yourself why BSD isn't dying. Pickup FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, or Darwin and enter 'happybday' as the coupon code when you checkout. [This won't last long.]"

Chris Coleman writes: "Daemon News is pleased to announce the availability of pre-orders for FreeBSD 4.5. This will be our first release of FreeBSD on CD. We will be using the official FreeBSD 4.5 ISOs created by the FreeBSD project. The expected release date for FreeBSD 4.5 is January 20th. We expect to have CDs available two weeks after that. We are taking pre-orders at this time to help gauge the number of CDs we will need to produce. You can pre-order CDs here. CD subscriptions are available here. Vendor pricing will be handled through cylogistics.com."

Chris Coleman writes: "Daemon News is pleased to announce the availability of pre-orders for FreeBSD 4.5. This will be our first release of FreeBSD on CD. We will be using the official FreeBSD 4.5 ISOs created by the FreeBSD project. The expected release date for FreeBSD 4.5 is January 20th. We expect to have CDs available two weeks after that. We are taking pre-orders at this time to help gauge the number of CDs we will need to produce. You can pre-order CDs here. CD subscriptions are available here. Vendor pricing will be handled through cylogistics.com."

questionlp writes: "The January 2002 issue of Dæmon News Ezine has been published. This month's issue has the continuation of the tcsh article, test driving NetBSD, NetBSD's 2001 timeline, an article on embedded BSD, DOSSIER and the Meta project, and a book review of FreeBSD Unleashed."

A BSD User writes: "Yesterday, Daemon News announced a new line of BSD clothes. The clothes themselves look very cool and have a "Daemon Crossing" sign on them. It's nice to see Daemon News and their BSD Mall site filling in the hole recently left by WindRiver Systems."

A BSD User writes: "Yesterday, Daemon News announced a new line of BSD clothes. The clothes themselves look very cool and have a "Daemon Crossing" sign on them. It's nice to see Daemon News and their BSD Mall site filling in the hole recently left by WindRiver Systems."

Daemon Staff writes: "Daemon News has just announced FreeBSD Training Classes and a really cool new t-shirt. They finally have one on black! Chris Coleman announces everything in his Editorial in this month's Daemon News Ezine."