MidnightBSD

MidnightBSD is a free BSD distribution forked from the FreeBSD operating system and built around the GNUstep graphical desktop environment. It aims to deliver an easy-to-use desktop-oriented OS for the masses. It is distributed under both BSD and GPL open-source licenses.

Supports 32-bit and 64-bit computers

This FreeBSD-derived operating system is available for download as installable-only ISO images that support both 32-bit (x86) and 64-bit (x86_64) computers. The user must download and write the ISO image that corresponds to his/her computer’s architecture on a CD disc or a USB thumb drive (recommended).

Boot-only ISO images are also available for download, designed for people who just want to boot the operating system and access a minimal shell prompt, as well as virtual appliances for the VMware and Parallels virtualization software.

Boot options

When booting the ISO image from the BIOS of a PC, using either a USB stick or a Compact Disc, you will be dropped to a boot menu from where you can boot the system and load the installer, drop to a shell prompt, reboot the machine, enable ACPI (Advanced Configuration and Power Interface), as well as to boot in safe mode, single user mode or verbose mode

What is new in this release:

• MidnightBSD 0.8 includes several enhancements to the system. We switched system compilers from GCC 4.2 to llvm/clang 3.3 with plans to update to newer versions. We're making use of libdispatch in our package manager. Several longstanding bugs with the mports framework have been fixed.

What is new in version 0.8:

• MidnightBSD 0.8 includes several enhancements to the system. We switched system compilers from GCC 4.2 to llvm/clang 3.3 with plans to update to newer versions. We're making use of libdispatch in our package manager. Several longstanding bugs with the mports framework have been fixed.

What is new in version 0.7:

• This release is primarily for stabilization, ZFS and mport package tool enhancements.

What is new in version 0.6:

• Security:
• OpenSSL: The receipt of a specifically crafted DTLS handshake message may cause OpenSSL to consume large amounts of memory. [CVE-2014-3506]
• The receipt of a specifically crafted DTLS packet could cause OpenSSL to leak memory. [CVE-2014-3507]
• A flaw in OBJ_obj2txt may cause pretty printing functions such as X509_name_oneline, X509_name_print_ex et al. to leak some information from the stack. [CVE-2014-3508]
• OpenSSL DTLS clients enabling anonymous (EC)DH ciphersuites are subject to a denial of service attack. [CVE-2014-3510]
• TCP SYN: When a segment with the SYN flag for an already existing connection arrives, the TCP stack tears down the connection, bypassing a check that the sequence number in the segment is in the expected window.
• Fix several security vulnerabilities in routed, rtsold, and namei with respect to Capsicum sandboxes looking up nonexistent path names and leaking memory.
• The input path in routed(8) will accept queries from any source and attempt to answer them. However, the output path assumes that the destination address for the response is on a directly connected network.
• Due to a missing length check in the code that handles DNS parameters, a malformed router advertisement message can result in a stack buffer overflow in rtsold(8).
• tnftp 20141031 fixes a security vulnerability with tnftp, CVE-2014-8517.
• Fix a security issue with file and libmagic that can allow an attacker to create a denial of service attack on any program that uses libmagic.
• BIND servers which are configured to perform DNSSEC validation and which are using managed keys (which occurs implicitly when using "dnssec-validation auto;" or "dnssec-lookaside auto;") may exhibit unpredictable behavior due to the use of an improperly initialized variable.
• CVE-2015-1349 An integer overflow in computing the size of IGMPv3 data buffer can result in a buffer which is too small for the requested operation. This can result in a DOS attack.
• IPv6: The Neighbor Discover Protocol allows a local router to advertise a suggested Current Hop Limit value of a link, which will replace Current Hop Limit on an interface connected to the link on the MidnightBSD system.
• sqlite 3.8.9 - Fix a potential 32-bit integer overflow problem in the sqlite3_blob_read() and sqlite3_blob_write() interfaces.
• Enhancements:
• Fix building perl during buildworld when the GDBM port is installed.
• Fixed a bug with our clearenv(3) implementation that caused segfaults with some programs including Dovecot.
• Update USB quirks to support K70 Corsair keyboard, and several other devices.
• New Software Versions:
• Apple mDNSResponder 561.1.1
• mksh R50e
• OpenSSH 6.6p1
• OpenSSL 0.9.8.zf
• serf 1.3.8
• sudo 1.7.8
• sqlite 3.8.9
• tnftp 20141031
• tzdata 2014i
• xz 5.0.7
• mports & package tools:
• libmport now supports plist commands @dir, @owner, @group, @mode and @sample. This allows pkg-plist files to set permissions and handle creation and removal of directories. Previously, @dirrm only allowed the removal of directory on uninstall. This required some plists to contain mkdir commands built in. The new process is cleaner and faster.
• This also means that ports that have been updated are not compatible with MidnightBSD 0.5 and lower mport tools any longer.
• libmport attempts to detect an interactive tty is in use and will silence certain status messages when run in a non-interactive session.
• There are several new asset types in plists including ASSET_DIR and ASSET_SAMPLE. Clients consuming libmport may need changes if they were altering behavior with handling plist files.
• The database version for mport packages was updated (package version) and new columns for CPE were added to the database. This information is also exposed via the mport info command and many mports now provide this information. You can use mport cpe to list a summary for installed packages.
• Regarding packages, the current selection is not great. There are currently 1500 packages for i386 and 1400 for amd64. This is due to major refactoring to the mports system in progress. Available package count has doubled since January and we expect more to be available soon. Some items will need to be built manually using mports rather than binary package. This is unfortunately true for xorg-server currently. We are working on getting X11 packages available for binary installation as a top priority.
• If you are updating an existing system, after installing 0.6, you can use mport upgrade to update packages with 0.6 versions. It is recommended that you delete /usr/mports/Packages and run mport clean to remove old package remnants.

What is new in version 0.5.2:

• Fixed a regression with mksh R50c.

What is new in version 0.5:

• Security:
• Fixed a security issue with TCP SYN packet processing that could result in a denial of service attack.
• Fixed a bug with clearenv(3) that could result in a segfault
• Several OpenSSL security issues were addressed in this release including [CVE-2014-3506], [CVE-2014-3507], [CVE-2014-3508] and [CVE-2014-3510]
• Fix a vulnerability in the control message API. A buffer is not properly cleared before sharing with userland.
• Sendmail failed to properly set close-on-exec for open file descriptors.
• ktrace page fault kernel trace entries were set to an incorrect size which resulted in a leak of information.
• Fix a TCP reassembly bug that could result in a DOS attack
• bsnmpd contains a stack overflow when sent certain queries.
• Enhancements:
• Jails now run shutdown scripts.
• Support for username with length 32. Previous limit was 16
• Imported FreeBSD 9.2 usb stack (plus z87 patches from stable)
• Updated em(4), igb(4) and ixgbe(4)
• MidnightBSD now works with Z87 Intel chipsets.
• rarpd supports vlan(4) and has a pid flag. (from FreeBSD)
• Support for 65,536 routing tables was added. (up from 16)
• Added subversion to base (as svnlite)
• virtio(4) imported from FreeBSD 9-stable. SCSI support not included
• Removed Features:
• Sparc64 platform support
• Remove (BIND) named from base. We still include the client utilities for now until replacements are found.
• New Software Versions:
• File 5.19
• MKSH R50
• less v458
• Perl 5.18.2
• Sendmail 8.14.7 (plus AAAA record patch)
• Subversion 1.8.1
• zlib 1.2.7
• mports & package tools:
• libmport was modified to support the concept of "upgrade" to migrate from one OS release to another. Packages now contain OS version they were built with. mport list now displays the OS version of the package to help with updating and mport list updates was changed to suggest upgrading to the current version.
• Several bug fixes around checksum handling were resolved.
• Package builds for the release are not yet complete.
• KDE was removed from mports due to lack of a maintainer for our ports. KDE 3.x was too insecure and 4.x has not worked correctly for some time on MidnightBSD.
• Currently, we're recommending xfce 4.x as a desktop environment.

What is new in version 0.4:

• A new package management tool, mport, was added.
• A large number of features were imported from FreeBSD 9.1, including ZFS with ZPOOL 28/dedup support, LLVM + CLANG in base, a migration to GPT as the default in the installer, bsdinstall, BSD licensed sort and grep, cpucontrol(8), and UFS2 + SUJ (journaling).
• Also imported were the newer FreeBSD USB stack, NFSv4 client, syscons, and CAM based ATA.

What is new in version 0.3:

• 0.3 includes exciting new features such as support for ZFS, mDNSResponder for multicast DNS, libdispatch (no blocks support yet), brainfuck(1), AMD CPU temperature monitoring, updates to the linux emulation layer (2.6.16 compatibility) and the OpenBSD sensors framework.
• This release includes a large merge from FreeBSD 7.0-RELEASE. Developers voted on the decision to merge many aspects of FreeBSD 7 into MidnightBSD in November 2008. This merge took some time and delayed the 0.3-RELEASE. It is not planned to do anything of this nature again. This release is thus based on FreeBSD 7.0 instead of 6.1.
• Several new scripts have been added to make it easier to manage the system. One of these is netwait in rc.d. It allows you to wait for a network interface to come up while booting to ensure network activity is ready for touchy software.
• Updated Software
• The following software packages were updated for this release:
• batt(1) rewritten in C
• BIND 9.6.1-P2
• bzip2 1.0.6
• cpudup (DragonFly)
• diffutils 2.8.7
• em(4)
• GCC 4.2.1
• libarchive (2.5.5) with bsdcpio
• libreadline 5.2 (GNU)
• mksh R39c
• nve(4)
• OpenNTPD 4.4
• OpenSSH 5.3p1
• OpenSSL .98e
• pnpinfo
• Sendmail 8.14.4
• sudo 1.7.2p6
• sqlite 3.6.23
• tcpdump 3.9.8
• tzdata 2010e
• unzip (BSD)
• zlib 1.2.5
• New software:
• ale(4)
• amdtemp(4)
• audit (OpenBSM)
• brainfuck (MirBSD)
• firmware(9) from FreeBSD
• jemalloc (FreeBSD)
• libdispatch
• libffi 3.0.9
• makefs (NetBSD)
• mDNSResponder
• mport tools (optional new package system)
• netpgp (NetBSD)
• nfe(4)
• Sensors framework (OpenBSD) including sensorsd(8)
• ZFS (v6)
• Removed software:
• Alpha & PC98 utilities from usr/sbin
• pcc
• pcvt(4)
• HPFS support

What is new in version 0.2.1:

• This version focused on adding hardware for newer devices including ATI, NVIDIA and Intel SATA controllers, and wireless support standard. A great deal of work was put into creating packages with over 2,000 packages available on our FTP server. The new release includes two CDs of packages plus X11 on disc1. Other software updated: GCC 3.4.6, BIND 9.4.2-p1, Sendmail, bzip2, OpenSSH 5.0p1, PCC compiler added (i386), removal of GNU cpio for BSD licensed version, cpdup added, IPv6 fixes, mksh added. Users who install KDE from the ISOs will be able to enable graphical login on boot-up. A script now runs on the first boot asking to enable BSDStats and 'graphical desktop environment'.