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FreeBSD Handbook, 2nd Edition Available

Posted by timothy on from the happy-hallowe'en dept.

Murray Stokely writes: " The second edition hardcopy release of the FreeBSD Handbook is now available! Written by the FreeBSD Documentation Project, the FreeBSD Handbook is a comprehensive guide to installing and running FreeBSD. This book was typeset using entirely open source software. It covers the installation and day-to-day use of FreeBSD, the ports collection, kernel configuration, the X Window System, printing, FreeBSD's Linux binary compatibility support, upgrading your system from source by using the ``make world'' command, and much more. Among the many changes since the 1st edition are the inclusion of a full index, all new graphical network diagrams, several new chapters, more professional typesetting, and content that has been completely updated for FreeBSD 4.x and 5.0-CURRENT. If you are interested in purchasing a copy of the handbook, you can do so online from the FreeBSD Mall."

4 of 22 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Good to see some BSD news! by flynn_nrg · · Score: 2, Informative
    "they clear up the problems with their license"

    Care to elaborate on that? What problems are those? Unless you've been living under a rock FreeBSD is released with the new BSDL, not the old one with the advertising clause, and it's perfectly compatible with the GPL and matches RMS's criteria (something 99% of BSDers couldn't care less about). If you've ever used old Linux kernels perhaps you noticed in the 2.0.x series that the NCR53C8xx driver was available both as the imported BSD driver and as one created by the Linux kernel hackers.

  2. The FreeBSD handbook is available online. by flynn_nrg · · Score: 2, Informative

    Here you have all the info you need to learn about FreeBSD.

  3. Lack of BSD documentation by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

    You guys keep complaining about how few books there are for (Free)BSD.
    1. Use the man pages! They are there with you on the machine, they are correct, they get updated.
    2. Use generic O'Reilly books for programs like Sendmail, Samba, bind, NFS, NIS, Apache etc.
    3. Look at additional documentation and examples available in /usr/share/
    4. The old 4.4 BSD manual set is availabe from O'Reilly. It is still useful combined with fresh maual pages.
    5. Use websites like FreeBSD.org, freebsddiary.org, daemonnews.org, etc.
    6. Search the mailinglist archives
    7. Subscribe to the mailinglists
    Something does not get better documented just because there are 20 different books describing how to do the same thing. (mostly installing the OS)

  4. Re:Questions on the book. by Nik · · Score: 2, Informative
    there is essentially 1 book for FreeBSD.


    There's the "Complete FreeBSD" by Greg Lehey, the "FreeBSD Corporate Networker's Guide" by Ted Mittlestadt, and "FreeBSD: An Open Source Operating System for your PC" by Annelise Anderson at least. SAMS have a FreeBSD book coming out shortly, and O'Reilly have several FreeBSD books in the pipeline (including the "FreeBSD Network Administrator's Guide", which I'm co-authoring).

    Do they comment on the kernel config file better?


    You need to be more specific. What do you find missing from LINT?

    I'd say a device driver book would be nice


    Take a look at the FreeBSD Developer's Handbook, which has a very large section on device driver writing. And feel free to contribute.

    N