Table of Contents
This document is currently available in the following formats:
In addition, this guide is also sold on occasion in printed form at
tradeshows and exhibitions, with all profits being donated to the NetBSD
Foundation.
On demand printing may at some point be available as well.
If you are interested in obtaining a printed and bound copy of this
document, please contact <www@NetBSD.org>.
This guide was born as a collection of sparse notes that Federico Lupi, the original author of the NetBSD Guide, wrote mostly for himself. When he realized that they could be useful to other NetBSD users he started collecting them and created the first version of the guide using the groff formatter. In order to “easily” get a wider variety of output formats (e.g. HTML and PostScript/PDF), he made the “mistake” of moving to SGML/DocBook, which is the current format of the sources. Maintainership was picked up by the NetBSD project and its developers later, and the format was changed to XML/DocBook later due to better tools and slightly more knowhow on customisations.
The following open source tools were used to write and format the guide:
the vi editor which ships with NetBSD (nvi).
the libxslt parser from GNOME for transforming XML/DocBook into HTML.
the TeX system from the NetBSD packages collection. TeX is used as a backend to produce the PS and PDF formats.
the tgif program for drawing the figures.
the gimp and xv programs for converting between image formats and making small modifications to the figures.
Many thanks to all the people involved in the development of these great tools.