Recently, the release of the desktop-oriented operating system MidnightBSD 3.2 took place. This operating system is based on FreeBSD with elements ported from Dragonfly BSD, OpenBSD, and NetBSD. The basic desktop environment is built on XFCE, but users have the option to set the bunch of Gnustep + Window Maker + Gearkspace. An installation image of 949 MB is available for download for both i386 and amd64 architecture.
MidnightBSD OS differs from other FreeBSD desktops as it was originally developed as a fork of FreeBSD 6.1-Beta. It was later synchronized with the FreeBSD 7 code base in 2011 and absorbed capabilities from FreeBSD 9-12 branches. The MPORT system is used to control packages in MidnightBSD, utilizing the SQLite database for storing indices and metadata. Package management can be done using the mport command or the ports ravenports.
Some of the basic innovations in MidnightBSD 3.2 include:
- Removal of the PERL interpreter, Brainfuck, and Subversion from the base system.
- Introduction of the Ravenports package system for AMD64 architecture.
- Update of the MPort package manager to version 2.6.2.
- Inclusion of ZSTD compression support in the Libarchive library.
- Addition of Telnetd and improvements for Linux compatibility.
- Updates to third-party components such as Expat, LDNS, Sendmail, and more.
- Added support for temperature sensors in AMD Zen4 processors and AMD KERNCZ chipset in RAID for the AHCI driver.
