Preface

Intended Audience

The FreeBSD newcomer will find that the first section of this book guides the user through the FreeBSD installation process and gently introduces the concepts and conventions that underpin UNIX®. Working through this section requires little more than the desire to explore, and the ability to take on board new concepts as they are introduced.

Once you have travelled this far, the second, far larger, section of the Handbook is a comprehensive reference to all manner of topics of interest to FreeBSD system administrators. Some of these chapters may recommend that you do some prior reading, and this is noted in the synopsis at the beginning of each chapter.

For a list of additional sources of information, please see Appendix B.

Changes from the First Edition

This second edition is the culmination of over two years of work by the dedicated members of the FreeBSD Documentation Project. The following are the major changes in this new edition:

• A complete Index has been added.

• All ASCII figures have been replaced by graphical diagrams.

• A standard synopsis has been added to each chapter to give a quick summary of what information the chapter contains, and what the reader is expected to know.

• The content has been logically reorganized into three parts: ``Getting Started'', ``System Administration'', and ``Appendices''.

• Chapter 2 (``Installing FreeBSD'') was completely rewritten with many screenshots to make it much easier for new users to grasp the text.

• Chapter 3 (``UNIX Basics'') has been expanded to contain additional information about processes, daemons, and signals.

• Chapter 4 (``Installing Applications'') has been expanded to contain additional information about binary package management.

• Chapter 5 (``The X Window System'') has been completely rewritten with an emphasis on using modern desktop technologies such as KDE and GNOME on XFree86™ 4.X.

• Chapter 7 (``The FreeBSD Booting Process'') has been expanded.

• Chapter 12 (``Storage'') has been written from what used to be two separate chapters on ``Disks'' and ``Backups''. We feel that the topics are easier to comprehend when presented as a single chapter. A section on RAID (both hardware and software) has also been added.

• Chapter 17 (``Serial Communications'') has been completely reorganized and updated for FreeBSD 4.X/5.X.

• Chapter 18 (``PPP and SLIP'') has been substantially updated.

• Many new sections have been added to Chapter 19 (``Advanced Networking'').

• Chapter 20 (``Electronic Mail'') has been expanded to include more information about configuring sendmail.

• Chapter 22 (``Linux Compatibility'') has been expanded to include information about installing Oracle® and SAP® R/3®.

• The following new topics are covered in this second edition:

  • Configuration and Tuning (Chapter 6).

  • Multimedia (Chapter 16)

Organization of This Book

This book is split into three logically distinct sections. The first section, Getting Started, covers the installation and basic usage of FreeBSD. It is expected that the reader will follow these chapters in sequence, possibly skipping chapters covering familiar topics. The second section, System Administration, covers a broad collection of subjects that are of interest to more advanced FreeBSD users. Each section begins with a succinct synopsis that describes what the chapter covers and what the reader is expected to already know. This is meant to allow the casual reader to skip around to find chapters of interest. The third section contains appendices of reference information.

Conventions used in this book

To provide a consistent and easy to read text, several conventions are followed throughout the book.

Typographic Conventions

User Input

Keys are shown in bold to stand out from other text. Key combinations that are meant to be typed simultaneously are shown with `+' between the keys, such as:

Ctrl+Alt+Del

Meaning the user should type the Ctrl, Alt,and Del keys at the same time.

Keys that are meant to be typed in sequence will be separated with commas, for example:

Ctrl+X, Ctrl+S

Would mean that the user is expected to type the Ctrl and X keys simultaneously and then to type the Ctrl and S keys simultaneously.

Examples

Examples starting with E:\> indicate a MS-DOS® command. Unless otherwise noted, these commands may be executed from a ``Command Prompt'' window in a modern Microsoft® Windows® environment.

E:\> tools\fdimage floppies\kern.flp A:

Examples starting with # indicate a command that must be invoked as the superuser in FreeBSD. You can login as root to type the command, or login as your normal account and use su(1) to gain superuser privileges.

# dd if=kern.flp of=/dev/fd0

Examples starting with % indicate a command that should be invoked from a normal user account. Unless otherwise noted, C-shell syntax is used for setting environment variables and other shell commands.

% top

Acknowledgments

The book you are holding represents the efforts of many hundreds of people around the world. Whether they sent in fixes for typos, or submitted complete chapters, all the contributions have been useful.

Several companies have supported the development of this document by paying authors to work on it full-time, paying for publication, etc. In particular, BSDi (subsequently acquired by Wind River Systems) paid members of the FreeBSD Documentation Project to work on improving this book full time leading up to the publication of the first printed edition in March 2000 (ISBN 1-57176-241-8). Wind River Systems then paid several additional authors to make a number of improvements to the print-output infrastructure and to add additional chapters to the text. This work culminated in the publication of the second printed edition in November 2001 (ISBN 1-57176-303-1).