Making Friends with tcsh
by Konrad Heuer

Today, csh and the more comfortable successor TC-Shell (tcsh) are still the default login shells on a BSD system. Despite their impressive functionality, they seem to lose popularity compared to the GNU Bourne-Again-Shell (bash) of the Free Software Foundation. This article, divided into three parts (this is part two) to be published in consecutive issues of the Daemon News, will show that csh and especially tcsh don't need to hide. The article is meant to be an introduction for readers new to BSD. Read More

Test Driving NetBSD Current
by Hubert Feyrer

Often the latest and greatest (and most unstable :-) features of our favourite BSD release are only available in the -current (development) branch. But how when running a release version, how can you upgrade the system to -current to get a feature that is only present there? Depending on the feature you want, there is a way to get it without upgrading the whole machine to the latest development snapshot. Read More

DOSSIER and the Meta Project (Part 1)
by Rich Morin

Unixish operating systems (BSD, GNU/Linux, Solaris etc.) are quite complex. Although a large amount of documentation exists for these systems, the coverage is incomplete in several fundamental ways. This article describes the problem, a proposed remedy, and a supporting business model! Read More

NetBSD in 2001
by Hubert Feyrer

2001 was an eventful year in many ways. In addition to the many political and economic changes that occurred, which influence all our lives, there were many changes in the technical sector showing interesting trends. One of these changes is the increasing popularity and awareness of Open Source software. While Linux has become a serious alternative to established server and desktop systems, BSD based systems are getting increasing attention due to their clearer internal structure, maturity and stability. This article intends to talk a bit about the highlights of the NetBSD project in the year 2001, with hope that this trend will continue in 2002. Read More

Embedded BSD
by Terry Lambert

If you are considering building an embedded system, you would do well to learn from the examples of such companies as IBM, Apple, Array Networks (formerly ClickArray), Foundry Networks, Ricoh, Intel, and many, many others who use a BSD platform at the heart of some of their products. Read More

FreeBSD Unleashed Book Review
by Linh Pham

In October 2001, FreeBSD Unleashed was published with a goal to provide a guide that ranges in topics from the very basics of FreeBSD to building a secure and multi-talented FreeBSD workstation or server. The book covers a lot of topics, as the size and weight of the book show, which is organized into six parts, which are broken into thirty-four chapters and four appendixes. The first five parts of the book are ordered so that it starts off with the basics of FreeBSD and progresses up to the more technical and detailed topics like security and networking services. Read More

The Answerman
by Todd Whitesel

More answers to questions from the mailbag. The Answer Man touches on kdm and keyboard issues, kernels mysteriously building commented-out items, WordPerfect for Linux on a macppc, the 'const' keyword in C (and C++), illegible C function pointer declarations, and more. In addition, the 2001 Year-End Round Up, an index of topics from the last year's columns, at no extra charge. Read More

Daemon's Advocate
by Wes Peters

I've read several columns lately about the limitations of open source software, or at least the open source development model. Being dedicated to several open source projects, I tend to dismiss these as the rantings of those who do not understand open source, or who have a political or economical axe to grind. Then I had an interesting design discussion with my boss, Matt Smith. We were discussing a problem in the user interface of our product, which is based on quite a bit of open source software. We have experienced very few problems with the open source components in our product, largely because we have selected proven technology; this is one of the big advantages to using open source in a commercial product. Read More