MidnightBSD is a FreeBSD-derived operating system.

MidnightBSD began as a fork from FreeBSD 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 PC-BSD or DesktopBSD. At the same time, he also had an interest in GNUstep. 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 mports system with over 2000 packages. The Portable C Compiler was added on i386 in addition to the GNU Compiler Collection. 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.

Currently, the project is focusing on finishing the Magus build cluster software, creating a new installer, finishing the new package installation and management tools called mport, and beginning work on the 0.3 release. The next release will feature some enhancements found in FreeBSD 7.0 and DragonFly BSD.

Updates (via Distrowatch):

Lucas Holt has announced the release of MidnightBSD 0.3, an operating system (forked from FreeBSD 6) with a goal of creating an easy-to-use desktop environment with graphical ports management and system configuration: "I'm happy to announce the availability of MidnightBSD 0.3. i386 ISO images are available on our FTP server and amd64 should be available in the next day or so. MidnightBSD 0.3 includes exciting new features such as support for ZFS, mDNSResponder for multicast DNS, libdispatch, AMD CPU temperature monitoring, updates to the Linux emulation layer and the OpenBSD sensors framework. This release includes a large merge from FreeBSD 7.0-RELEASE. 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."

Read the detailed release notes for more information.

Download: 0.3-RELEASE-i386-disc1.iso (430MB, SHA256), 0.3-RELEASE-amd64-disc1.iso (425MB, SHA256).