This is the first development version in the new 4.0 branch

Mar 9, 2014 08:12 GMT  ·  By

GhostBSD 4.0 Alpha 1, a FreeBSD-based operating system that relies on Xfce LXDE, MATE, and OpenBox desktop environments, is now ready for testing and download.

A few months have passed since the previous stable release of GhostBSD, so the developers had time to implement quite a few new things, which is not a surprise, especially after the strange choice of packages that were added in the 3.5 version.

GhostBSD 3.5 was dubbed “Levi” and featured quite a few interesting changes, some of which made it not seem like a simple maintenance update. For example, the GhostBSD developers finally replaced the aging GNOME 2.32 with MATE 1.6 and offered the Xfce 4.10 flavor as an alternative.

The current version also comes with a few major changes, but at least they kept the MATE desktop, which proved to be a good idea. As it was to be expected, the new distribution is based on FreeBSD 10.0, which is a much newer version.

As you recall from the previous announcement, GhostBSD developers chose to replace LibreOffice with its older counterpart, OpenOffice. As the changelog states, LibreOffice is now back because OpenOffice failed to compile with CLANG.

Also, SpiderOak has been made part of the default installation, a new GBI Partition editor interface has been implemented, Webcamd has been installed (users will have to enable and configure it), a new network manager has been added (it should be a lot friendlier than the one used before), pkg_add has been replaced by pkgng, Bxpkg has been removed from the iso, and Nano has been added.

"Please be aware this release provides willing users, beta testers and developers with a system to test out new features in the upcoming release. This release may contain buggy code and features, so we encourage you to run it only on non-critical systems," reads the announcement from the developers.

The distribution is available for both the 32-bit and 64-bit architectures. Check out the official announcement for more details about this release. Download GhostBSD 4.0 Beta 1 right now from Softpedia.

Unlike other distributions we usually present, GhostBSD is not based on Linux. In fact, there is a great deal of operating systems out there just as free and open source as Linux. This is just one system like that, but it’s as powerful and versatile as any other.

Remember that this is a development version and it should NOT be installed on production machines. It is intended for testing purposes only.