Yes. The documentation is available in a number of different formats and
compression schemes on the FreeBSD FTP site, in the /pub/FreeBSD/doc/
directory.
The documentation is categorized in a number of different ways. These include:
-
The document's name, such as faq, or handbook.
-
The document's language and encoding. These are based on the locale names you will
find under /usr/share/locale on your FreeBSD system. The
current languages and encodings that we have for documentation are as follows:
Note: Some documents may not be available in all languages.
-
The document's format. We produce the documentation in a number of different output
formats. Each format has its own advantages and disadvantages. Some formats are better
suited for online reading, while others are meant to be aesthetically pleasing when
printed on paper. Having the documentation available in any of these formats ensures that
our readers will be able to read the parts they are interested in, either on their
monitor, or on paper after printing the documents. The currently available formats
are:
-
The compression and packaging scheme. There are three of these currently in use.
-
Where the format is html-split, the files are bundled up
using tar(1). The resulting
.tar file is then compressed using the compression schemes
detailed in the next point.
-
All the other formats generate one file, called book.format (i.e., book.pdb, book.html, and so on).
These files are then compressed using two compression schemes.
So the PostScript version of the Handbook, compressed using BZip2 will be stored in a
file called book.ps.bz2 in the handbook/ directory.
After choosing the format and compression mechanism that you want to download, you
must then decide whether or not you want to download the document as a FreeBSD package.
The advantage of downloading and installing the package is that the documentation can
then be managed using the normal FreeBSD package management comments, such as pkg_add(1) and pkg_delete(1).
If you decide to download and install the package then you must know the filename to
download. The documentation-as-packages files are stored in a directory called packages. Each package file looks like document-name.lang.encoding.format.tgz.
For example, the FAQ, in English, formatted as PDF, is in the package called faq.en_US.ISO8859-1.pdf.tgz.
Knowing this, you can use the following command to install the English PDF FAQ
package.
# pkg_add ftp://ftp.FreeBSD.org/pub/FreeBSD/doc/packages/faq.en_US.ISO8859-1.pdf.tgz
Having done that, you can use pkg_info(1) to
determine where the file has been installed.
# pkg_info -f faq.en_US.ISO8859-1.pdf
Information for faq.en_US.ISO8859-1.pdf:
Packing list:
Package name: faq.en_US.ISO8859-1.pdf
CWD to /usr/share/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/faq
File: book.pdf
CWD to .
File: +COMMENT (ignored)
File: +DESC (ignored)
As you can see, book.pdf will have been installed into /usr/share/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/faq.
If you do not want to use the packages then you will have to download the compressed
files yourself, uncompress them, and then copy the appropriate documents into place.
For example, the split HTML version of the FAQ, compressed using bzip2(1), can be found
in the doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/faq/book.html-split.tar.bz2
file. To download and uncompress that file you would have to do this.
# fetch ftp://ftp.FreeBSD.org/pub/FreeBSD/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/faq/book.html-split.tar.bz2
# bzip2 -d book.html-split.tar.bz2
# tar xvf book.html-split.tar
You will be left with a collection of .html files. The main
one is called index.html, which will contain the table of
contents, introductory material, and links to the other parts of the document. You can
then copy or move these to their final location as necessary.
