14 DAY TRIAL // MidnightBSD, a distribution based on FreeBSD that aims to provide an easy-to-use desktop environment with graphical ports management, and system configuration using GNUstep, is now at version 0.4.
MidnightBSD 0.4 integrates a large number of new features, but the most interesting one is the addition of mport, a new package management tool.
“This release is a bit different from previous releases in that we plan to update packages during the support period for 0.4. Rather than upload packages and sit on them for the life of the release, you will be able to download updated packages for i386 and amd64 periodically,” reads the official announcement.
Highlights of MidnightBSD 0.4:
• The package offering for the distribution is smaller than the usual, but these packages will be expanded in the coming weeks; • A large number of features have been from FreeBSD 9.1 (to no one's surprise). This means the distribution now benefits from ZFS with ZPOOL 28/dedup support, LLVM + CLANG in base, migration to GPT as the default in the installer, bsdinstall, BSD licensed sort and grep, cpucontrol(8), and UFS2 + SUJ (journaling); • The newer FreeBSD USB stack, NFSv4 client, syscons, and CAM based ATA features have been imported; • Support for newer hardware, such as Intel Sandy Bridge and Ivy Bridge graphics, various wifi chipsets, updates to Intel and Realtek ethernet adapters, and acpi, has been implemented; • GCC 4.2 is still the default compiler for the system; • MidnightBSD now has its own GPT partition types; • Various third-party libraries have been included, such as bzip2 1.0.6, Diffutils 3.2, OpenSSH 5.8p2, • SQLite 3.7.15.2, BIND 9.8, Perl 5.14.2 mDNSResponder 333.10, libarchive 3.0.3, libdialog (lgpl version), sendmail 8.14.5, sudo 1.7.4-p6, tzdata_2012j, and a few others.
More details about this release can be found in the official announcement.
Download MidnightBSD 0.4 right now from Softpedia. Remember that this is a development version and it should NOT be installed on production machines. It is intended for testing purposes only.