Mirrors Primary (US) Issues April 2000 April 2000 Search Submit Article Contact Us How to Help Merchandise T H I S M O N T H ’ S F E A T U R E S From the Editor Managing websites using Unix:Part 4 The Future of BSD? by Nick Clayton by Brett Taylor The future's so bright... The long awaited continuation... Read More Daily Daemon News April ezine is out! No FreeBSD BOF at ApacheCon 2000 fooling! by Rob Arnold FreeBSD Diary site seized! SSH Communications An on the spot report from ApacheCon2000. Read More Security Announces SSH Secure Shell 2.1 The open-source pretenders? Merger Interview NetBSD ported to MIPS by Chris Coleman based Cobalt machines Feedback from BSDI and NetBSD on the latest merger everyone’s talking about. Read More Source Wars Week 12 R E G U L A R C O L U M N S Newbies by Jonathan McKitrick New User to FreeBSD? Perhaps these tips will help point you in the right direction. Read More Miscellaneous Answer Man Credits by Gary Kline and David Leonard The hard-working crew It seems no matter how many FAQ’s there are, some Tarball questions continue to get asked. In this issue Gary and Download a tar.gz David answer some more questions that seem to frequently version of this issue poke their way into the lists. Read More Search The Dæmon’s Advocate Search by Greg Lehey Advanced In this issue of Daemon’s Advocate, Greg gives us insight on the (new) SIS feature in Windows 2000. He also digs or Search all Daemon into an advocate’s thought on what’s being labeled as the News biggest news of the year. Read More Copyright © 1998-2000 DæmonNews. All Rights Reserved. April 2000 Search Submit Article Contact Us Join Us Merchandise The Future of BSD? by Brett Taylor [email protected] In the past year there have certainly been a number of big developments that have had a big influence (if only in the public perception) on BSD. Apple has released Darwin as Open Source and it’s based on code taken from FreeBSD and NetBSD. Their new operating system, OS X, has this same BSD layer inside. Certainly that’s going to increase the BSD user base, even if most of its users don’t know about it. Of course one of the biggest events was the announcement of the merger of BSDI and Walnut Creek (read more about this in Greg Lehey’s Daemon’s Advocate). As Greg notes, there was a lot of grumbling concerning what this would mean for FreeBSD since Walnut Creek has been the primary financial backer for the project, but also how this would affect NetBSD and OpenBSD. At this point I think it’s far too early to make any serious predictions about what effects this is going to generate in the BSD world. What can we say then about the future? Is it bright and rosy? If you look at most any Slashdot item that mentions BSD you’ll see strong opinions from some (note I said some) Linux users that BSD should just roll over as Linux has already won. I don’t know what they’ve won, but that’s a separate issue I guess. I don’t think it’s good to have any one platform completely dominate the market. Many of these same people are Microsoft bashers because they feel Microsoft is completely controlling the market and is evil, and yet they want Linux to completely control the computer world (maybe Linus is a benevolent dictator). Regardless, I think that when someone like Apple steps in and uses BSD code it says something about the quality of the BSD codebase. Yes, it certainly made life easier for them since they were coming from NeXT (which was BSD-based), but if the code was poor they would have certainly gone some other way. I like to think of myself as an optimist. I think with the merger and Apple’s use of BSD code, we’ll see more native software ported for the BSDs (Apple, if you're listening I'd like a Quicktime player - I'd even pay for it). I look forward to seeing the coming merge of code between the BSD/OS and FreeBSD codebases, but I won’t be personally tracking -current unless I get another play machine to do it on - I’ll watch from afar for now. :-) I also am looking forward to playing around with Darwin and Mac OS X (when it comes out) on my new iBook which should be here shortly. So let’s look to the future with an optimistic eye - worry about the problems when they show up! Just a couple quick announcements: You’ll notice that we have a new Newbies’ Corner columnist on board with this issue. Jonathon McKitrick is a new FreeBSD user and if you are on the -questions mail list you’ve certainly seen his name. Being a new user, Jonathon can hopefully provide some new user insight that us old timers have forgotten (‘‘when I was a youngster we had to learn graphics programming on an Apple IIe using machine code’’). Welcome on board Jonathon. Finally, a warm welcome back to Nik Clayton with his series on managing websites using CVS and make. I’ve personally been waiting for the next article, as have many other readers who’ve written us, for too long. If anyone can lend Nik a hand with household chores to free up some more writing time for him that would be great. Author maintains all copyrights on this article. Images and layout Copyright © 1998-2000 Dæmon News. All Rights Reserved. April 2000 Search Submit Article Contact Us Join Us Merchandise Managing websites using Unix Part Four Copyright © Nik Clayton [email protected] This is the fourth in a series of articles explaining how to use the tools provided by Unix and clones (such as the free BSD implementations, and the various different Linux distributions) to manage the contents of a website, such as the free webspace that ISPs often give to their customers. There is nothing about the techniques described here (and in future articles) that limit them to small, personal websites. The author has successfully used these approaches to manage sites with thousands of pages and half a dozen active webmasters working on the site. 1. Isn’t this a little bit late? When I first started this series, I expected to be able to put out an article a month, for a total of six articles. Things were fine for the first three articles, and then my workload in real life went just a little bit mad. That’s why this article is roughly nine months over due. Sorry about that. My thanks to the various people who have e-mailed me over the past nine months or so with praise for the previous articles. You all acted as a very strong incentive to continue, and I hope you find this article, and the rest in the series, very useful. To refresh your memory, the previous articles were: Article 1 An introduction to CVS Article 2 An introduction to make(1) and a simple make install Article 3 A more complete make install 2. Introduction If you have followed the previous articles you should now have a framework you can use to install the files in your work area (which you have been adding to your CVS repository as you go) in to the staging area. This framework includes a number of simple Makefiles, which do little more than list the names of the files which must be installed, and a more complex web.mk, which is included in to the smaller files, and contains most of the logic. This article explains how you can use make(1) to help automate converting files from one format to another. In particular, it describes how you can covert image files from JPEG format to GIF format automatically, and shows how this technique can also be used to store binary files safely in the CVS repository. Note: Do not forget the CVS commands from the previous articles. You should use them to add and commit the files you write while following this article. Important: The sample Makefiles in this article are written for Berkeley Make, the default on the BSD systems. Some of these examples are not compatible with other make(1)s, such as GNU Make. Download a copy of Berkeley Make from http://www.quick.com.au/ftp/pub/sjg/help/bmake.html. 3. Pre-requisites 1. The sh(1) scripting language. While not essential, this will make it easier for you to follow some of the examples in this article. 2. The netpbm[1] utilities. These are a suite of command line programs to convert image files from one format to another, and they will be used in many of the examples. FreeBSD users can download them from graphics/netpbm in the ports collection. If you are using another OS then the original installation files can be found at ftp://ftp.x.org/R5contrib/netpbm-1mar1994.tar.gz, and your OS might have ‘‘pre-packaged’’ versions of these programs available. You can use other image conversion tools if you prefer, but you will have to adjust the examples as necessary. 3. The Independent JPEG Group’s JPEG software. This is a set of libraries and some command line tools to help manipulate JPEG images. FreeBSD users can download them from graphics/jpeg in the ports collection.