Dedication

As always, for Liz

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I would like to thank all the members of the FreeBSD community for their hard work, dedication, and friendship. FreeBSD has saved my hide on numerous occasions, and has taught me immense amounts about how computers and the Internet really work. I have yet to speak with the president of a software company, whereas I've spent many hours discussing FreeBSD with project leaders.

Having said that, there are a few people in that community who deserve my particular thanks for reviewing the book in your hands. They are, in order, Szilvester Adam, John Baldwin, Wilko Bulte, Chris Dillon, Giorgos Keramidas, Chris Knight, and Joel Wilsson. Any errors in this book were introduced by myself, despite their best efforts.

The folks at No Starch Press also deserve my heartfelt thanks for actually bringing this to print. My original manuscript needed a lot of work to become something that looks decent on the printed page. Thanks, guys, and I'll make it easier next time. I would also like to thank Chris Coleman, my editor at http://onlamp.com/, who brought No Starch Press and I together in the first place.

Most of all I want to thank my wife, Liz, for her patience and support while I sat in the corner and muttered under my breath for months at a time while writing this book.

Michael Lucas

St. Claire Shores, Michigan

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Foreword

Twenty five years. My god, has it really been that long? In 1976, the first BSD release was produced by U.C. Berkeley's CSRG, it and subsequent releases of BSD having either spawned or substantially influenced every Unix operating system to come after, including Linux and AT&T's System V, through a commitment to innovation and to adding all the "missing pieces" that Unix was lacking. Features like Virtual Memory, TCP/IP networking, job control, and even the venerable vi screen editor (before which there was simply ed(1)) all came out of BSD. Not just operating systems, but a number of POSIX and X/Open standards also owe their existence to it—an influential "little project" indeed!

We started FreeBSD in 1992, a project that you'll read quite a bit about in this book, as a means of carrying this work forward after the CSRG was disbanded and it looked like the BSD project, for all its history and promise, might be coming to an end. This was not a state of affairs that BSD's many fans were willing to settle for, and I'm happy to say that they rallied magnificently to the cause.

Far from being the end of BSD, the last 10 years have seen an almost explosive amount growth in the BSD community, with FreeBSD operating systems powering some of the most significant companies and sites on the Internet, setting new bandwidth and "uptime"; records and making the acronym BSD almost synonymous with high performance, security, and reliability for those in the Internet service industry.

FreeBSD's success has also hardly been limited to servers. With Apple's adoption of FreeBSD as a key open−source technology for its Mac OS X operating system, it has since been introduced to a whole new generation of enthusiastic users, many of whom would never have considered themselves Unix users before but are now enjoying the benefits of a powerful operating system combined with Apple's legendary user interface technology and a world−class suite of applications. Even the most jaded Unix experts have been impressed at what BSD has grown into, and I suspect that, at this point, it has surpassed even the wildest dreams of its creators.

Whether you're a Unix expert or someone who has never touched Unix before, you'll find this book to be an excellent introduction to the unique and impressive world that is BSD. If you enjoy it even half as much as I have, you're in for a great time!

Jordan Hubbard

Co−Founder, The FreeBSD Project

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