Some of the FreeBSD tasks may seem daunting, especially to those who have no prior experience with FreeBSD or similar operating systems. This page should provide enough information to enable you to get started and in a position to work on the tasks as quickly as possible.

If you have any problems with any of the instructions here, please do feel free to talk to your mentor, or ask on IRC. There are many mentors available in #freebsd-soc on EFnet, feel free to pop in and say hello even if you are not having issues!

The easiest way to get started with the Google Code-In tasks is to download the pre-made Virtual Machine image. This is available from http://XXXX/ . It is known to work with VirtualBox, but should also work with minimal effort under VMware and Parallels.

Once the VM image has been imported, boot it. The image has been set up so that all your work can either be done on the VM console itself, or over SSH. After the machine has booted, basic instructions will be shown on the console, including the IP address that the virtual machine has been given. You can SSH to this IP address (using the gcin account) if you wish to work over SSH rather than directly on the console. GNOME is also available in the VM image, should you prefer to use the VM directly.

There are two accounts set up:

You should only need to use the gcin username/password for most tasks.

In the home directory of the gcin users, a directory called “gcin2011” exists, containing checkouts from the repositories most likely to be useful during GCIN:

All three trees are checked out using Subversion.

(to be written)

(to be written)

The preferred format for submitting work done is in diff format. To produce a diff of your work, us the “svn diff” command.

For example, to create a diff of changes made to the FreeBSD handbook, the following command should be used:

svn diff doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/ > /var/tmp/gcin-handbook.diff

Then, upload the file /var/tmp/gcin-handbook.diff to Google Melange.

Note, however, that any new files (i.e. files created rather than modified) will not be included in the output of “svn diff” and should be uploaded separately.

All the supplied trees can be updated using “svn update”. For example:

svn update gcin2011/doc

There are several ways of obtaining the source code, each with advantages and disadvantages. This document describes just one approach, and users experienced with source control may prefer to use an approach they are more familiar with.

The following assumes that you are using FreeBSD, either on a real machine, or in a virtual environment, and that your system has Internet access.

The FreeBSD Project currently still uses CVS to store its documentation. In order to make things easier for GCIN students, we have started exporting the doc tree to a Google Code svn repository, which should prove easier for students unfamiliar with CVS to work with.

Check the tree out with:

svn checkout http://freebsd9-documentation.googlecode.com/svn/branches/gcin2011/doc doc

Once you are ready to test your changes, follow the instructions at http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en/books/fdp-primer/overview-quick-start.html

As the FreeBSD source code is held in SVN, this can be checked out directly:

svn co svn://svn.freebsd.org/base/head/

(To write)

As you made a copy of the file before you made changes, you can produce a diff from it with:

svn diff doc > /var/tmp/gcin-taskname.diff

This file can then be submitted to your task mentor(s) during the task, and uploaded to Google Melange once you feel the task is complete.

Note that this diff will only contain modified files, and not files that have been added. Any files created from scratch should be uploaded to Google Melange separately.