About Icon About MidnightBSD

Midnight the cat
The "Midnight" in MidnightBSD

MidnightBSD is a FreeBSD-derived Operating System. A critical goal of the project is to create an easy to use desktop environment with graphical ports management, and system configuration using Xfce. The vast majority of the operating system will maintain a BSD license. Certain software packages use other licenses such as X.org, GCC, and GNUstep.

MidnightBSD was forked from FreeBSD 6.1 beta. The system was forked to allow us to customize and integrate the environment including the ports and system configuration. We wish for the system to appeal to beginners as well as more experienced BSD users. Many operating systems are under active development; with MidnightBSD, we wish to focus on optimization and usability improvements for desktop users.

The FreeBSD project has developed a reliable server operating environment, but often usability and performance on the desktop is overlooked. Scheduling, allocation of resources, security settings, and available application support should be tailored to desktop users. Many of the BSD projects are tailored to servers or older hardware. Others are distributions of FreeBSD with a nice graphical user interface, but still suffer from server-centric design under the hood. We did not fork FreeBSD as a result of a falling out, but rather as an excellent starting point. It should be viewed as a compliment to the FreeBSD developers who have worked very hard on FreeBSD 5.x and 6.x.

We hope to create something unique. Project goals include:

  • A new window and login manager. [Replaced by Etoile, then xfce + mlogind]
  • Centralized system preferences while maintaining the BSD style on the command line.
  • A graphical ports and package management system. Currently we use a derivative of FreeBSD ports. [Now we have mports]
  • Work on various portions of the kernel including syscons, process and disk scheduling, imports of FreeBSD and OpenBSD drivers, etc.
  • Importing useful features from DragonFly, MirBSD, OpenBSD and NetBSD.
  • Improving security with little distraction to the end user. [ipfw is enabled in 0.2+, sudo added, many other changes are coming]

2015 Update

Later versions of MidnightBSD synced large bits from newer FreeBSD releases. 0.3 included code from FreeBSD 7 and 0.5 included a large sync from FreeBSD 9.1 release. MidnightBSD now targets i386 and amd64 (x86_64) based computers and includes all hardware supported in FreeBSD 9.1 plus additional devices.

MidnightBSD also includes ZFS, hast, UFS2 journaling, SSD TRIM, Perl, mDNSResponder, OpenSSH, and a slew of other things.

2021 Update

We switched from GNUstep + Window Maker + GWorkspace to Xfce as our desktop environment. We still plan to maintain support for GNUstep environments as much as possible, but it's much easier to do integration with Xfce.

MidnightBSD 2.x incorporates major features of FreeBSD 11-stable now including bhyve, updated GPU support, and toolchain.

We're now including a default .xinitrc and updated the midnightbsd-desktop pacakge to include basics for a desktop. Work is continuing on the package manager to support installs from the installer rather than the firstboot rc.d script.

We've imported doas from OpenBSD to replace sudo.

History

MidnightBSD: Naming an OS

Picking a name for MidnightBSD was challenging. Many domain names related to BSD are in use by different parties. desktopbsd's domain had been purchased but not up yet. My list of 35 names didn't last long when I started checking whois records.

After anything obvious for the desktop was taken, I decided to follow DragonFly's idea of using a living element. Many stupid names came up like SharkBSD, HammerHeadBSD, etc. I decided they sounded stupid. I thought of TigerBSD; it sounded nice and I could think of some good themes for it. However, I was afraid a certain fruit company would get upset with me. Finally, I decided to name MidnightBSD after my first cat, Midnight.

Newer logo designs feature a cat sitting on the moon. This was a compromise as so many people hear the name and think of the time of day. The previous logo on the website was a picture of Midnight's eyes.

Also, a cat has a similar shape to the BSD daemon, and there is of course the "cat" command.

Midnight was a black turkish angora with long hair and gold eyes. When he was younger, he used to shutdown Netscape on me while I was surfing to get attention on my old iMac (OS 9). He frequently sat on top of PCs and Macs. He passed away during the summer of 2015 after a battle with cancer.

Release History

At the time of writing, we've released 13 major versions of MidnightBSD since 2006. 0.1, 0.1.1, 0.2.1, 0.3, 0.4, 0.5, 0.6, 0.7, 0.8, 1.0, 1.1, 1.2, and 2.0. You can read more on the Release Notes page.

Discover BSD Interview

MidnightBSD with Lucas Holt (March 2016)

BSD Now Interview

Episode 92, BSD After Midnight (June 2015)

BSDTalk Interview

Listen to the BSDTalk interview. (August 2007)