Documentation

Installation

Introduction

While MidnightBSD plans to target moderate and novice users, currently installation is too difficult for beginners to *NIX like operating systems. Experience with BSD, Linux, or another *NIX like system is very helpful. FreeBSD users familiar with bsdinstall should have no problem with this procedure. You may also consult the MidnightBSD Wiki or FreeBSD Handbook for additional information not found on this page.

Preparing For Installation

You may download MidnightBSD from our FTP server or any mirrors, provided that you have a broadband internet connection. You will need disk 1 of a release in order to install MidnightBSD.

You will need free space on your hard drive. While the system runs very well on a few gigabytes of disk space, we recommend at least 15GB of space for use with mports on a desktop. An Intel Pentium class computer or equivalent is required. We have removed 486 support from the default install, although it can be compiled in. At least 96MB of RAM is required for installation.

Depending on your needs, various graphics cards are supported at different levels. Many network cards are supported as well as a few wireless network cards. We will document them at a later time. Many onboard audio controllers are supported as well as other cards like the Creative Labs Sound Blaster Audigy and Audigy 2 families.

UEFI

MidnightBSD can co-exist with Microsoft Windows or Linux on the same disk. The approach will vary depending on your system using UEFI or legacy BIOS. With UEFI, one can use GRUB 2, the Windows built in manager (with customization), or rEFInd (recommended). reFFInd is ideal for supporting Microsoft Windows and MidnightBSD dual boot.

Legacy BIOS

For legacy BIOS, it is recommended that you use GRUB from Linux if you wish to dual boot MidnightBSD with Linux. For Windows XP, the included boot manager is sufficient. Third party boot managers such as GAG or System Commander 8.20+ are supported as well. I used to dual boot Windows XP SP2 and MidnightBSD with System Commander on my primary desktop. With Windows Vista, you should use the boot manager included with Vista (and the boot1 file from CD) or a third party boot manager such as GAG. The included one with not work with Vista (overwrites it)

You may also install MidnightBSD using a virtualization product such as VMWare Workstation, VMWare ESXi, VirtualBox, Parallels, qemu, or Microsoft Virtual PC.

Installation Media Preparation

You will need to burn a copy of the Disk 1 iso from our FTP server using your favorite CD burning software. If you need to download burning software, LiquidCD for Mac OS X, and InfraRecorder for Windows XP are both free and easy to use. Also, on OS X, you can burn with Disk Utility. For FreeBSD 9.x or MidnightBSD 1.2 or earlier, you can use burncd (part of os).

With the USB flash image, you can install on macOS or Windows 10+ with etcher or by using dd on macOS/Linux/BSD with sudo dd if=imagefilename of=/dev/yourusbdev

Installing MidnightBSD

There is a YouTube video covering installation available: Installing MidnightBSD 2.0 2.0 and higher have similar installation procedures.

Insert the MidnightBSD USB flash drive or CD into your CD-ROM drive and start up your PC. On some systems, you may need to enter the BIOS to enable booting from the flash media or CD-ROM drive first. On some systems, there is a button you can push to select the CD-ROM drive. For instance, on some Dell systems you can press F12 and then pick the CD-ROM drive. F11 is also common for the boot manager.

You should see a red and blue screen come up after a few moments preceded by a lot of white and black text. If several minutes pass with no activity, and you do not see this screen, please report it. There maybe a bug or an incompatibility with your system we can work to fix.

From this point, you may follow the steps in bsdinstall to complete installation.

If you are interested in legacy releases, you may follow along with the BSD Magazine article on installing MidnightBSD. in the August 2010 issue. This procedure covers 0.1-RELEASE - 0.3-RELEASE. 0.4 installation is a bit different. There are also some YouTube videos available for older releases.

Example Hardware Configurations

You can check out BSD Hardware for a list of some systems running MidnightBSD, including details on what is detected.

Here is a list of systems that MidnightBSD has been tested on.

Hardware tested with MidnightBSD 3.0.x
Hardware Status Notes
Lenovo ThinkPad A485 Partially works The onboard WiFi chip is not supported. Display dimming does not work. Sound works. When installed with UEFI amd64 release, X will work with the fb. The AMD graphics are not supported for acceleration, but the firmware is available in mports and once X.org and mesa are updated, it should work. (June 2023) Onboard NIC works as well as trackpad.
HP Victus Gaming laptop - 1240p i7 with nvidia 1060 Partially works The onboard WiFi chip is not supported. Can switch out to intel wifi 8265, etc. Trackpad does not work! X does not work reliably with FB. Gets confused between onboard graphics and nvidia graphics.
Asus PRIME Z590 intel core i7 11900k Partially works Onboard GPU supported only on FB, not accelerated. Otherwise, fully supported.
Asus B550 TUF with Ryzen 5700x Works
Gigabyte B550 motherboard with ryzen 5700x Works
Asus Tuf B series motherboard with Intel i7 11700 Partially works Onboard GPU supported only on FB, not accelerated. Otherwise, fully supported.
Asus TUF Gaming B450M-PLUS II with Ryzen 5800x Works
HP Envy 8767 Desktop with Intel i7 10700 Partially works Onboard GPU supported only on FB, not accelerated. Otherwise, fully supported.
Asrock Z490 steel legend motherboard with Intel i7 10700 Partially works Onboard GPU supported only on FB, not accelerated. Otherwise, fully supported.
HP Z420 workstation with Xeon E5 v2 8 core CPU Works Original nvidia workstation GPU works with old nvidia driver from mports. Also works with AMD Radeon 6450 HD with acceleration using built in X.org support.
Hardware tested with MidnightBSD 1.2.x
Hardware Status Notes
Lenovo ThinkPad A485 Partially works The onboard WiFi chip is not supported. Display dimming does not work. Sound works. When installed with UEFI amd64 release, X will work with the fb. The AMD graphics are not supported for acceleration. (1.2 release) Note: Ryzen mobile 2500u chips require a boot loader setting in order to boot properly.
HP Z420 Workstation Works Fully supported. Onboard NIC and sound work. The original nvidia workstation graphics adapter requires a legacy version of the nvidia driver to function due to it's age. Also tested with an AMD Radeon HD 7450 and native x acceleration works with that card.
Asus Prime X370 Pro Motherboard Works Sound, onboard NIC, SATA controller work. Works with amd64 release of 1.1 and 1.2.
Asus Tuf B350-M Gaming Motherboard Works Sound, onboard NIC, SATA controller work. Works with amd64 release of 1.1 and 1.2.
ASUS PRIME Z270M-Plus motherboard Works Tested with i7-7700. Works fine. Audio and integrated graphics work in UEFI fb mode. This board does not work correctly with older releases due to USB compatibility. 1.1 or higher only.
AMD Radeon HD 7450 Works Recommended card. Has high compatibility
NVIDIA Works Using the binary driver in mports, you can use a NVIDIA 710GT, 960, or 1080ti. Additional cards may work but are untested.
AMD integrated graphics (Ryzen) Partially works No hardware acceleration is available for AMD vega or higher GPUs. They do work in UEFI fb mode though
Hardware Tested with MidnightBSD 0.2.x
Hardware Status Notes
Dell Precision 650 Works Dual 2.0Ghz Xeon 3GB ECC RAM IDE. Onboard sound, NIC work. Hyperthreading works
Custom Pentium PC Works Custom Built Intel Pentium D 805 dual core 2.66Ghz w/ Intel DP965LT motherboard. Onboard sound untested, network card works, IDE channels work (CD-ROM, etc). Sata controller works. Sound Blaster Audigy Gamer and Nvidia GeForce PCIe 7300 work as expected. System was upgraded to an ATI X1900 GT PCIe, that works with X11 using radeonhd (2D only)
Virtual PC Works Virtual PC for Windows works as expected. VPC 7 for Mac OS X works except the CDROM drive is "lost" during install. If you can get it installed using ftp install, it will work fine. Note, you must install 0.1.1 from FTP and then upgrade to 0.2 as sysinstall FTP installation is broken in 0.2.1
VMware Works VMware player works under Windows Vista or XP. VMware Fusion on Mac OS X runs MidnightBSD as expected. Unable to install the vmware-tools for better performance.
Sun Netra T1 Works You must use the 0.1 snap and then update to 0.2.1 release. We want to support these again come 0.3. One is a T1 105. Systems have 512MB and 768MB RAM, SCSI disks, one has an IDE cdrom drive. Onboard NICs work.
Qemu Works One of our developers uses qemu with the system. It is included in mports.
Parallels Works Parallels 3 or 4 work with MidnightBSD. Releases were tested on Parallels first actually. 0.4's SMP support works. Mac or PC versions.
IBM Thinkpad T30 Works Sound, video, NIC, DVD all work. System won't sleep and LCD won't turn off. This model has the "pointer stick" and does not have built in wifi. Using ndis with a broadcom wireless NIC works.
Asus M4A78 Plus Motherboard + AMD Phenom 9600 Does not work USB controller causes panics, freezes. Must disable USB 2 in bios to boot. Onboard NIC not supported and must be disabled. System supported otherwise.
iMac 2.0Ghz Core 2 Duo with 3GB RAM. (silver/black model) Feb 2008 Mostly works Wifi is not supported, although may work with NDIS drivers from bootcamp. Will boot off live cd without problem. Onboard NIC supported in 0.2.1-RELEASE or CURRENT. wifi might work in current with SMP disabled using bwi(4). Sound untested.
Mac Pro 2.0Ghz Quad Core (2 x 2) Does not work No video and freezes on bootup. Hates the sata dvd drive.
Hardware Tested with MidnightBSD 0.1.x
Hardware Status Notes
Dell Precision 650 Works Dual 2.0Ghz Xeon 1GB ECC RAM SCSI and IDE. Onboard sound, NIC work.
Custom Pentium PC Works Custom Built Intel Pentium D 805 dual core 2.66Ghz w/ Intel DP965LT motherboard. Onboard sound untested, network card works, IDE channels do not work (CD-ROM, etc). Sata controller works in recent snapshots. Sound Blaster Audigy Gamer and Nvidia GeForce PCIe 7300 work as expected.
Custom PC Works Custom Built Nvidia nForce 2 w/ sata raid (MSI motherboard) 512mb PC2700 DDR, 2 sata disks in gmirror raid 1 configuration, 1 ide disk for boot partition, onboard sound, Geforce 5200 AGP 8x. Onboard NIC (nvidia maclan) did not work correctly, but an OEM Intel em worked as expected. Some disk corruption occured on the sata raid setup, but determined to be a faulty drive.
Compaq Cyrix based 366Mhz Works X11 was not tested, but all devices including an included 3com 905 NIC worked as expected.
Dell PowerEdge 5300 Works Xeon 550Mhz PIII 512MB RAM, all scsi system. Works as expected including integrated ATI graphics.
Virtual PC Works Virtual PC for Windows works as expected. VPC 7 for Mac OS X works except the CDROM drive is "lost" during install. If you can get it installed using ftp install, it will work fine.
VMware Works VMware player works under Windows Vista. VMware Fusion on Mac OS X runs MidnightBSD as expected. Unable to install the vmware-tools for better performance.
Sun Ultra 10 3D creator Works Early releases were tested on a Sun Ultra 10 3D creator. The system died however. Last known working release was 0.1.1.
Qemu Works One of our developers uses qemu often with the system. It is included in mports. I believe he's also run MidnightBSD virtualized inside of OpenBSD.

In general, if hardware worked in FreeBSD 6.0 Release it will most likely work in MidnightBSD. Some drivers were imported from FreeBSD 6.1 beta, 6.1 Release and 6.2. 0.3-CURRENT includes drivers from FreeBSD 7.0-RELEASE. We've also added support for several other systems such as network cards found in Intel based iMacs, newer AMD, Intel and NVIDIA SATA chipsets, and fixes for Apple mice.

Updating the Operating System

Currently, the only method to update the OS core libraries is through use of the subversion tool. MidnightBSD 0.6 and higher include the svnlite command as part of the base system. You may checkout the updated source code from the stable branch of the release and build it. Detailed instructions are available in the developer section of the website.

We plan to add binary update capability to the mport tools. This work has not yet started.

Packages may be updated with the mport update or mport upgrade commands. The latter will update all installed packages whereas the former can be used to update individual packages.