On Friday, 14 October 1995, I received a visit from a number of people from Walnut Creek CDROM,
with whom I had published a CD-ROM of ported free software. This experience had also prompted
me to write a book, “Porting UNIX Software”. At the time of the visit, O'Reilly and
Associates were in the course of publishing the book, and I showed the final drafts to Jack
Velte and Greg Long. They were very interested, and Jack said “Can't you write a book
about how to install FreeBSD? Doesn't need to be long, just about 50 pages or so.”
At the time I had installed FreeBSD on a couple of machines, but my operating system of
choice was BSD/OS. The idea sounded like fun, though, and so I quickly hacked together a few
pages. Jack and Greg liked what they saw, and so we went ahead. I had gained some experience
with using groff while writing “Porting UNIX Software”, and as the result of
some production issues that I had had with that book, we agreed that I would do the entire
formatting and supply the book in PostScript format.
On 24 February 1996, little over 4 months later, I submitted the final draft of a book which
I called “Running FreeBSD 2.1”, and which Walnut Creek called “Installing And
Running FreeBSD”. That's the way it was printed, as those of you who have this book can
confirm.
The book was a great success. Of course, it was a little more than 50 pages; in fact, a
total of 322 pages, including 54 pages of man pages from the FreeBSD distribution. Despite
this, Jack wasn't happy: “Those Linux books have over 1000 pages! This looks like
nothing. What can you do? We need something yesterday!”.
Well, I had started the trend with the first edition. I added many more man pages, a little
more editorial content, and 5 months later, on 19 July, I submitted the next version. We had
now agreed on the title: “The Complete FreeBSD”, with only 844 pages still shy of
the 1000 page mark. 542 of those pages were man pages. Given the extreme time constraints, I'm
still surprised that I managed so much.
From then on, I had more time to work on the book, and the material evolved in a more
orderly manner. I formatted the second (or was that third?) edition on 29 November 1997, now
with a whopping 1,766 pages (of which only 1,108 were man pages; that still left 658 pages of
real content). Jack was finally pleased.
That proved to be too much, though. People complained that the book was unwieldy, and after
all, man pages are intended to be read online. We agreed that printing lots of man pages was
also a waste of money. When the third edition appeared, on 17 May 1999, it was slimmer: only
808 pages, still including 126 pages of man pages chosen because they could be of use when the
machine wasn't running.
Changes were afoot in the industry, though. Jack left Walnut Creek, and later Bob Bruce
merged Walnut Creek CDROM with BSDI. Shortly after that, they were taken over by Wind River
Systems, who were ambivalent about the book. Round this time I convinced Andy Oram, my editor
at O'Reilly, to publish the book. The fourth edition finally appeared in O'Reilly's
“Community Press” series in May 2003. It had 718 pages and—oh
wonder!—none of them were man pages.
That's the current status. Looking at those dates, you'll see that as time went on, each
edition was further from its predecessor. There are several reasons for this: the material is
mainly there, there are now other books on FreeBSD out there, and I don't have the time.
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