May 2004
Intermediate to advanced
450 pages
12h 18m
English
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Chapter 8. Keeping Up-to-Date
Introduction
One of the distinguishing characteristics of the BSDs is the ease with which you can keep your operating system source and installed software up-to-date. In fact, each of the BSDs provides multiple alternatives, allowing users to choose the approaches that best match their time and bandwidth requirements.
This chapter provides a plethora of ways to maintain an updated system. While many are written from the FreeBSD perspective, don’t let that stop you from hacking your own customized NetBSD or OpenBSD solutions. In fact, this chapter concludes with one user demonstrating how to enjoy the benefits of the BSD ports and packages collections on Mac OS X!
Automated Install
If you’re responsible for installing multiple systems, hopefully you’ve discovered the art of automating installs.
Most operating systems have some sort of scripting mechanism that allows you to predefine the answers to the questions asked by the install program. Once you’ve started the actual install, you can leave and return to a fully installed system. The alternative is to sit there, answering every prompt when it appears. No, thank you!
Even as a home user, it’s well worth your while to spend a few minutes customizing the install script that comes with FreeBSD. Try this hack once and you’ll never want to sit and watch an install again.
Preparing the Install Script
Before installing any system, you need to know the following:
The IP settings and hostname of the host you’re installing ...
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O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.Julian F.
I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.Addison B.
I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.Amir M.
I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.