Tim O'Reilly Confirms BSD Publications

InfoMonk writes: "I attended a library conference over the weekend. Tim O'Reilly spoke at a presentation on Open Source Software for libraries. After the conference I asked him about the long running interest in O'Reilly putting out BSD publications. He confirmed that two projects are currently in development, the expected BSD in a Nutshell and another book whose subject is not yet clear. This is very good news of course, to BSD hackers who are slightly tired of the press coverage that Linux has been given in the past year."

Comments

Re:How do the 3 BSDs relate to each other?

[The_Messenger]

I think you're trying to start a flamewar, but that's irrelevant. The answer is: BSD4.4-lite. BSD Unix was born in the early Eighties, when the CSRG at Berkeley got hold of Unix. (Shortly after its birth at Bell Labs, many Universities were allowed to use it for research and educational purposes. Much of this development made its way back into the official code.) The CSRG did developed much of what Unix is today, from vi and the C Shell, to Unix TCP/IP.

Yes, TCP/IP. Back when ARPANet was being developed, DARPA needed an OS implementation of TCP/IP to work with. Thus, they funded Berkeley CSRG during the mid-late Eighties, and BSD is intricately tied to the roots of the Internet.

TCP/IP made its way back to AT&T, along with a lot else. Even with the commercial proprietary OS boom of the Eighties, there was much code sharing, and so the many Unices never got too far apart. Obviously the major reason for this is they all had to license it from AT&T. ;-)

System V, Revision 4 (SVR4) brought together the best of the Unix world, and while based largely on AT&T's UNIX, also includes a lot of BSDish stuff. Other companies' work was used as well, including pieces of Xenix. SVR4 is POSIX, what your beloved GNU/Linux is based upon.

SRV4 is the "modern" UNIX base, used in all commercial UNIX OSes. (Solaris, AIX, Irix, HP-UX, et cetera.) A note on Solaris: SunOS (as it was originally known) was formerly BSD based; not surprising, considering that Bill Joy is its father. But Sun switched to SVR4 in the late Eighties/early Nineties, and it has been known since as Solaris. Solaris 8 is really Solaris 2.8, which is SunOS 5.8. (Look at your Solaris bootlog...)

In the early Nineties, the original Berkeley CSRG was ready to call it quits. Before they did, they wanted to release their complete modern OS codebase to the community, as 4.4BSD. But there were still lingering pieces of UNIX code in BSD, which were removed after a series of messy lawsuits. The commercial code was rewritten, and the OS, now completely free, was released as 4.4BSD-Lite.

This codebase, whose history goes back to the very beginnings of UNIX itself, was adopted by several groups of developers who wanted to revive BSD Unix. The two most successful were FreeBSD, who concentrate on being the most advanced BSD Unix for the x86 arhictecture, and NetBSD, whose goal seems to be to run BSD on every processor ever designed. :) Not long ago, a disgruntled BSD developer forked the NetBSD code and created OpenBSD, an OS with tons of cool integrated cryto-nrrd stuff, which is famous as being perhaps the most secure network OS currently in use.

So, to the point, all *BSD OSes are based on the 4.4BSD-lite code which was the Berkeley CSRG's final work.

The BSD which you forgot to ask about is BSDi. BSDi is a commercial BSD company, whose board of directors includes a few original CSRG members (I believe). BSDi recently purchased FreeBSD's distributor and will be merging the codebases. The best news to come so far of this is that FreeBSD will finally have a native Java2 development kit.

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On Growth of the BSD Community

[SecretAsianMan]

Well, I'd be willing to bet that most BSD people would welcome additional growth to the community. After all, BSD thereby gets more users, attracts more developers, and gains more/better software. With the increasing popularity of Linux -- or if I may, free UNIX -- I can only see growth as inevitable as *BSD gets swept up in the whole thing.

However, there's something to be said when you've got such a small, tight community as the BSD communities. Take the FreeBSD community, for instance. It's decidedly the largest group of *BSD afficionados out there, but it's still tiny compared to the Linux community. You can still get in touch with all of the main hackers. Greg Lehey, who wrote the book on FreeBSD (that is, literally the one printed book), still participates on several of the official mailing lists and answers when contacted by e-mail. I'm a complete nobody in the FreeBSD community, but I've talked (e-mail) with Greg many times.

Let us savor these things, us BSD people, because like it or not, the times they are a-changin'. I hope we can be as good big as we have been small

???

[BJH]

Walk into any medium-to-large bookstore in Japan. You'll find, n the Computer section, several shelves of Unix-related books. Among them, you will see many along the lines of "Build a Linux server", "Play with Linux", etc. etc. You will also see a nearly equivalent number of *BSD-related publications, everything from "Running MacBSD-68K" to "OpenBSD Security". There are beginners' books and weighty tomes on BSD kernel internals. And all this in a country with a population of half that of the US, and which is basically unable to export books to other countries because of the expense involved in translation (not to mention the "lag time" it adds).

My question is, "Why hasn't O'Reilly already published BSD books?" There's certainly enough potential interest to make it worth their while if they can put out books on Lego, f'Chrissakes.

Linux v. BSD

[bat'ka makhno]

This is very good news of course, to BSD hackers who are slightly tired of the press coverage that Linux has been given in the past year.

I can see how a little resentment can creep into the most level-headed individual when things like political, religious or operating system choice are at play. Nevertheless, I see the mindshare gains acquired by Linux and Open Source over the past two years as a patently good thing for other- some, I'm sure, will argue, better- free Unices. A lot of organizations have, it seems, warmed to the idea that commercial software might not be only available option, and as they discover that viable alternatives exist to their, say, Windows-centric perspective, Linux will not be the only OS that will gain popularity simply because once shown the possibility of choice, one's point of view usually becomes quite a bit more flexible.

That said, the fact that a great number of closed-source ISVs only support Linux or even, commonly, one particular distribution, does irritate me immensely, as does the growing disregard for portability in Open Source software written by Linux users for Linux users.
--
Violence is necessary, it is as American as cherry pie.
H. Rap Brown

printed BSD manual

[The_Messenger]

I would love to see the BSD manual published. O'Reilly breifly did that (probably almost ten years ago), but now it's all but impossible to find. I contacted them, and apprently they don't even have any copies in their warehouse. I'd love to have an updated copy.

But where will they get the manual from? CSRG is gone, and there are now three major BSD4.4lite-based OSes. My guess is they would go with FreeBSD's manual, since FreeBSD is the most successful, well known, and, some would argue, the most advanced of the three. But, truth be told, OpenBSD has an excellent manual, and I'll sometimes even consult it when I work with FreeBSD boxen.

Speaking of manuals, an excellent resource is the FreeBSD Project's manual webpage, actually a CGI script which allows to you to consult manuals from CSRG BSD, FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, several Linux distributions, SunOS (pre- and post-BSD-Exodus), as well as less common Unices such as Minix (har har), Plan 9, Ultrix, and Seventh Edition.

While we're ontopic, Sun Microsystems publishes a Solaris reference which is essentially the printed manual, but I would not recommend this book. All of Sun's Solaris books are absolutely horrid. (Which I've never understood; their Java books are wonderful.) Complete wastes of money. The only remotely useful things are the discussions of the mail system and network filesystems in the "Advanced System Administration" book.

Hands down, the best single Unix command reference book you can buy at the moment is O'Reilly's Unix in a Nutshell, but that is straight SVR4, with some Solaris-specific commands thrown in for good measure. You'll get what amounts to an abbreviated manual, along with stuff on shells, editors, and maybe a few system calls. If you would like to do system-level programming, Stevens' Advanced Programming in the UNIX Environment will counter-balance the Nutshell book nicely. Can never have too many reference books. :)

Forgive me, I love computer books, and tend to talk about them a lot

But that still does nothing for BSD users. Face it, guys, BSD is seen by much (dare I say most?) of the business IT world as "old" UNIX. Which it is, of course, but I don't find anything particularly wrong with that. But, it's a stumbling block which caused me to stop pushing it. (That, and the fact that my company is large enough to need the two dozen Sun and IBM boxen. I don't see many companies switching from Big Iron to clusters of x86 Free Unix boxen, but the high value and TOC of cheap x86 Unix are going to keep the current wave of IT startups going for another ten years.)

I honestly don't think I would buy BSD in a Nutshell. I'd rather have a printed manual, to complement Unix in a Nutshell, rather than replace it. Isn't that all I'd need? The vi and emacs syntax will be the same. So will awk, sed, and grep (for the most part). I'll be carrying two books around either way, so that stuff is just redundant.

Some say, "why have a printed manual at all, when everything is available on the system or online?" But you may be doing work at a location with both old and new SunOS boxes, and you're working on new SunOS, and you want to be make sure your shell scripts are portable between boxes. Having a printed BSD manual might come in handy then. Or you're on the subway going home from work, and you get in an argument with your geek buddies about proper BSD shutdown syntax. Or if you're like me, you just love computer books. So I'd buy the manual. But not the Nutshell book.

Okay, I'm ranting again.

"InfoMonk" mentions a mysterious BSD book in the works? I'm excited. I think a book on mid-level kernel work would do well. (Something to fill the void between The Complete FreeBSD and Design and Implementation of the 4.4BSD-lite OS.) Or a book on BSD-specific networking and TCP/IP. Hey, Roblimo, get us an interview with TOR so I can bug him about this. ;)

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