[FreeBSD-Announce] Definitive Guide to PC-BSD by Dru Lavigne

[Matt Olander]

Please forgive the long email but it's been awhile since I've read such 
a great BSD book like this one! Skip to the links below if you just need 
to buy the book now!!

Based on the books that I purchase from Amazon, I was delighted to see a 
  notification for a pre-order of Dru Lavigne's Definitive Guide to 
PC-BSD! I pre-ordered it from Amazon but unfortunately, Apress, the 
publisher did not have enough time to get the Live PC-BSD DVDs in there.

So, FreeBSD Mall to the rescue! Yes, I ordered it from there, too, so I 
could keep one at home and one at the office, like my Absolute FreeBSD 
2nd Edition *cough* Lucas update this! You got off easy not writing the 
PC-BSD book! Here's a link to the Mall Guide wit the DVD sleeve:

http://www.freebsdmall.com/cgi-bin/fm/pcbsdguide

This book for 44.99 USD includes the sleeve edition of the PC-BSD Live 
DVD so you can check it out and work through it on the fly. It's been 
great for qualifying laptops at local stores and makes great handouts 
for *NIX user groups and tradeshows. I noticed that Amazon has dropped 
the price by 4.50 so maybe we can get Theresa at FreeBSD Mall or Denise 
at iX to throw in some stickers or something special :D

For those of you that would like the box set DVD along with Dru's 
Definitive Guide to PC-BSD, you can get the bundle for a few bucks more, 
at 59.95 USD:

http://www.freebsdmall.com/cgi-bin/fm/pcbsdguide.bn

Make no mistake, while the book is the Definitive Guide to PC-BSD, it is 
loaded with FreeBSD goodness as well.

Of course, FreeBSD Mall and iXsystems are big sponsors of FreeBSD and 
PC-BSD so rest assured your money goes towards further development :)

I can't say enough about this Guide and the Hubble edition of PC-BSD. 
We've been using it at work for years and some long time Free/PC-BSD 
users learned some new tricks. Thanks, Dru!

Thanks to some ideas by Nick Clayton, Harrison Grundy, Josh Paetzel, and 
some others at EuroBSD over many beers, this is definitely getting ready 
for primetime, especially for quick deployments for home and enterprise 
users. Thanks to Kennedy Kasina for writing the new GUI that has gotten 
some rave reviews.

Kris and Josh Paetzel have redone the build servers so that we now have 
snapshots!

ftp://ftp.pcbsd.org/pub/snapshots/8/

These snapshots are based on STABLE and will include patches from mav@ 
and delphi@ from CURRENT to increase driver support and performance.

Kris has also completely rewritten the installer backend in pure shell 
scripting. The latest one includes GPT support, ZFS improvements, 
unattended installs and a vanilla FreeBSD install option! We're looking 
for volunteers to improve the vanilla FreeBSD install to that users can 
choose distributions as it's a bit simple right now.

This and many more things are documented in Dru's book. Kudos, Dru, 
another fine Guide :)

If you've thought about giving PC-BSD a try before but didn't want to 
dual or triple boot, now is your chance! You can even install the image 
right from the Live DVD. It's a little slow to boot as we ended up doing 
kernel modules instead of having it all built-in as there were some 
conflicts.

There might even be some Easter Eggs in the latest snapshot via James Nixon!

Also, we have made some extra PC-BSD sleeves that we have been shipping 
around the world for events. If you have an open source event or would 
like to get your University to try this out, please let Denise and 
Theresa know, with some advance notice so shipping costs can be minimized.

Cheers!
-matt

-- 
Matt Olander
CTO, iXsystems - "Servers for Open Source"  http://www.iXsystems.com
Public Relations, The FreeBSD Project         http://www.FreeBSD.org
BSD on the Desktop!                             http://www.pcbsd.org
Phone: (408)943-4100 ext. 113                     Fax: (408)943-4101