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!