The release of the desktop-oriented operating system MidnightBSD 2.2 has taken place, based on FreeBSD with elements ported from DragonFly BSD, OpenBSD, and NetBSD. The base desktop environment is built on GNUstep, but users have the option to install WindowMaker, GNOME, Xfce, or Lumina. A 774 MB installation image (x86, amd64) is prepared for download.
Unlike other desktop builds of FreeBSD, MidnightBSD was originally developed as a fork of FreeBSD 6.1-beta, which was synchronized with the FreeBSD 7 codebase in 2011 and subsequently incorporated many features from FreeBSD branches 9-12. The mport system is employed for package management in MidnightBSD, which uses an SQLite database to store indexes and metadata. Installation, removal, and searching of packages is done using the single command mport.
Key Changes:
- Updated versions of software include Perl 5.36.0, OpenSSH 8.8p1, lua 5.3.6, subversion 1.14.1, sqlite 3.38.2.
- The shell code /bin/sh is synchronized with the FreeBSD 12-STABLE branch.
- For the root user, the default shell is set to tcsh instead of csh, and the less utility is applied for paginated output.
- Patches from the pfsense project have been added, improving the performance of the dummynet traffic shaping system from 2Gb/s to 4Gb/s.
- The mport package manager has been updated to version 2.2.0. Dependencies libdispatch and gcd have been removed, allowing static builds of mport to be created. The plist has added the option 'desktop-file-utils' and implemented the ability to create packages with kernel modules. Support for using chroot for updating individual jail environments has been added.
- Sctp support has been ported to Netcat from FreeBSD.
- A function ptsname_r has been added to libc.
- Bug fixes for Ipfilter have been ported from FreeBSD.
- The init script ensures the activation of dbus and hald.
Additionally, it's worth noting the release of DragonFly BSD 6.2.2, which develops an operating system with a hybrid kernel, created in 2003 for the alternative development of the FreeBSD 4.x branch. Features of DragonFly BSD include a distributed versioned file system called HAMMER, the ability to boot 'virtual' kernels as user processes, data and metadata caching tools on SSDs, context-sensitive symbolic links, the capability to freeze processes while saving their state to disk, and a hybrid kernel that utilizes lightweight threads (LWKT). The new release includes only bug fixes.
Source: opennet.ru
