MidnightBSD is a free

Unix-Like A Unix-like (sometimes referred to as UN*X, *nix or *NIX) operating system is one that behaves in a manner similar to a Unix system, although not necessarily conforming to or being certified to any version of the Single UNIX Specification. A Uni ...

, desktop-oriented

operating system An operating system (OS) is system software that manages computer hardware and software resources, and provides common daemon (computing), services for computer programs. Time-sharing operating systems scheduler (computing), schedule tasks for ...

originally forked from

FreeBSD FreeBSD is a free-software Unix-like operating system descended from the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD). The first version was released in 1993 developed from 386BSD, one of the first fully functional and free Unix clones on affordable ...

6.1, and periodically updated with code and drivers from later FreeBSD releases. Its default desktop environment,

Xfce Xfce or XFCE (pronounced as four individual letters, ) is a Free and open-source software, free and open-source desktop environment for Linux and other Unix-like operating systems. Xfce aims to be fast and Lightweight software, lightweight whil ...

, is a lightweight user friendly desktop experience.

History and development

MidnightBSD began as a fork from

in 2005. The founder of the project, Lucas Holt, wished to create a BSD derived desktop operating system. He was familiar with several live CD projects, but not the work on TrueOS or

DesktopBSD DesktopBSD was a Unix-derived, desktop-oriented operating system based on FreeBSD. Its goal was to combine the stability of FreeBSD with the ease of use of K Desktop Environment 3, the default graphical user interface. History and development ...

. At the same time, he also had an interest in

GNUstep GNUstep is a free software implementation of the Cocoa (formerly OpenStep) Objective-C frameworks, widget toolkit, and application development tools for Unix-like operating systems and Microsoft Windows. It is part of the GNU Project. GNUst ...

. The two ideas were folded into a plan to create a user friendly desktop environment. MidnightBSD 0.1 was released based on the efforts of Lucas Holt, Caryn Holt, D. Adam Karim, Phil Pereira of bsdnexus, and Christian Reinhardt. This release features a modified version of the FreeBSD ports system. The ports system evolved into "mports" which includes fake support, generation of packages before installation, license tagging, and strict rules about package list generation and modification of files outside the destination. Many of these features were introduced in MidnightBSD 0.1.1. Christian Reinhardt replaced Phil Pereira as the lead "mports" maintainer prior to the release of MidnightBSD 0.1. D. Adam Karim acted as the security officer for the first release. All release engineering is handled by Lucas Holt. 0.2 introduced a refined imports system with over 2000 packages. The

Portable C Compiler The Portable C Compiler (also known as pcc or sometimes pccm - portable C compiler machine) is an early compiler for the C programming language written by Stephen C. Johnson of Bell Labs in the mid-1970s, based in part on ideas proposed by Alan ...

was added on i386 in addition to the

GNU Compiler Collection The GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) is a collection of compilers from the GNU Project that support various programming languages, Computer architecture, hardware architectures, and operating systems. The Free Software Foundation (FSF) distributes ...

. Other changes include enabling ipfw and sound card detection on startup, newer versions of many software packages including Bind, GCC, OpenSSH, and Sendmail, as well as a Live CD creation system. As of September 2021, the last release is version 2.1, with many features imported from FreeBSD 11. The default desktop environment was switched to

, but WindowMaker plus

is still available.

Etymology

MidnightBSD is named after Lucas and Caryn Holt's

cat The cat (''Felis catus''), also referred to as the domestic cat or house cat, is a small domesticated carnivorous mammal. It is the only domesticated species of the family Felidae. Advances in archaeology and genetics have shown that the ...

, Midnight, a ten-pound black

Turkish Angora The Turkish Angora (, 'Ankara cat') is a breed of domestic cat. Turkish Angoras are one of the ancient, natural breeds of cat, having originated in central Anatolia ( Ankara Province in modern-day Turkey). The breed has been documented as ear ...

License

MidnightBSD is released under several licenses. The kernel code and most newly created code are released under the two-clause

BSD license BSD licenses are a family of permissive free software licenses, imposing minimal restrictions on the use and distribution of covered software. This is in contrast to copyleft licenses, which have share-alike requirements. The original BSD lic ...

. There are parts under the GPL,

LGPL The GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL) is a free-software license published by the Free Software Foundation (FSF). The license allows developers and companies to use and integrate a software component released under the LGPL into their own ...

, ISC, and

Beerware Beerware is a tongue-in-cheek software license with permissive terms, which grants the right to do anything with the source code, assuming the license notice is preserved. Description Should the user of the code consider the software usefu ...

licenses, along with three- and four-clause BSD licenses.

Reception

Michael Plura from Heise said it is extremely hard to configure a MidnightBSD distribution without even a desktop. He pointed to the dev vlog and said the developer himself showed the difficulty of providing a desktop OS as a solo developer. Jesse Smith reviewed MidnightBSD 0.6 in 2015 for DistroWatch Weekly:DistroWatch Weekly, Issue 616, 29 June 2015
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References

External links

*
Magus: The MidnightBSD build clusterMidnightBSD Developer BlogMidnightBSD source code on Github
{{Berkeley Software Distribution 2007 software FreeBSD