книга The Complete FreeBSD

6: Post-installation configuration
7: The tools of the trade
8: Taking control
9: The Ports Collection
10: File systems and devices
11: Disks
12: The Vinum Volume Manager
13: Writing CD-Rs
14: Tapes, backups and floppy disks
15: Printers
16: Networks and the Internet
17: Configuring the local network
18: Connecting to the Internet
19: Serial communications
20: Configuring PPP
21: The Domain Name Service
22: Firewalls, IP aliasing and proxies
23: Network debugging
24: Basic network access: clients
25: Basic network access: servers
26: Electronic mail: clients
27: Electronic mail: servers
28: XFree86 in depth
29: Starting and stopping the system
30: FreeBSD configuration files
31: Keeping up to date
32: Updating the system software
33: Custom kernels

FreeBSD is a high-performance operating system derived from the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD), the version of UNIX developed at the University of California at Berkeley between 1975 and 1993. FreeBSD is not a UNIX clone. Historically and technically, it has greater rights than UNIX System V to be called UNIX. Legally, it may not be called UNIX, since UNIX is now a registered trade mark of The Open Group.
This book is intended to help you get FreeBSD up and running on your system and to familiarize you with it. It can’t do everything, but plenty of UNIX books and online documentation are available, and a large proportion of them are directly applicable to FreeBSD. In the course of the text, I’ll repeatedly point you to other documentation. I’m not expecting you to be a guru, but I do expect you to understand the basics of using UNIX. If you’ve come from a Microsoft background, I’ll try to make the transition a little less rocky.

The fourth edition
This book has already had quite a history. Depending on the way you count, this is the fourth or fifth edition of The Complete FreeBSD: the first edition of the book was called Installing and Running FreeBSD, and was published in March 1996. The next edition was called ‘‘The Complete FreeBSD’’, first edition. The first three editions were published by Walnut Creek CDROM, which ceased publishing activities in 2000. This is the first edition to be published by O’Reilly and Associates.
During this time, FreeBSD has changed continually, and it’s difficult for a book to keep up with the change. This doesn’t mean that FreeBSD has changed beyond recognition, but people have done a great job of working away those little rough edges that make the difference between a usable operating system and one that is a pleasure to use. If you come to FreeBSD from System V, you’ll certainly notice the difference.
During the lifetimes of the previous editions of this book, I realised that much of the text becomes obsolete very quickly. For example, in the first edition I went to a lot of trouble to tell people how to install from an ATAPI CD-ROM, since at the time the support was a little wobbly. Almost before the book was released, the FreeBSD team improved the support and rolled it into the base release. The result? Lots of mail messages to the FreeBSD-questions mailing list saying, ‘‘Where can I get ATAPI.FLP?’’. Even the frequently posted errata list didn’t help much.
This kind of occurrence brings home the difference in time scale between software releases and book publication. FreeBSD CD-ROMs are released several times a year. A new edition of a book every year is considered very frequent, but it obviously can’t hope to keep up with the software release cycle. As a result, this book contains less time-sensitive material than previous editions. For example, the chapter on building kernels no longer contains an in-depth discussion of the kernel build parameters. They change too frequently, and the descriptions, though correct at the time of printing, would just be
confusing. Instead, the chapter now explains where to find the up-to-date information.
Another thing that we discovered was that the book was too big. The second edition contained 1,100 pages of man pages, the FreeBSD manual pages that are also installed online on the system. These printed pages were easier to read, but they had two disadvantages: firstly they were slightly out of date compared to the online version, and secondly they weighed about 1 kilogram (2.2 lbs). The book was just plain unwieldy, and some people reported that they had physically torn out the man pages from the book to make it more manageable. As a result, the third edition had only the most necessary man
pages.
Times have changed since then. At the time, The Complete FreeBSD was the only English-language book on FreeBSD. Now there are several—see Appendix A, Bibliography, for more detail. In particular, the FreeBSD online handbook is available both in printed form and online at http://www.freebsd.org/handbook/index.html, so I have left much of the more time-sensitive issues out of this book. See the online handbook instead. Alternatively, you can print out the man pages yourself—see page 15 for details.
It’s very difficult to find a good sequence for presenting that material in this book. In many cases, there is a chicken and egg problem: what do you need to know first? Depending on what you need to do, you need to get information in different sequences. I’ve spent a lot of time trying to present the material in the best possible sequence, but inevitably you’re going to find that you’ll have to jump through one of the myriad page cross references.

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