BSD & Darwin Archive

I bought a Topton GM1 Industrial Mini PC for my HomeLab. It is aimed at running Slackware Linux but I wanted to have a quick look at how well BSD OSes support it out-of-the-box. Joel Carnat That’s really all there’s to this story. I just really, really love tiny industrial and office computers and thin clients, and every time I see another one for sale I really have to stop myself from buying one I have absolutely no use for. There’s just something about how these little guys are built that speaks to me – they’re different than regular PCs, but only marginally so, making them fun to play around with, getting drivers for everything, seeing if Linux and BSD have any issues with it, and so on. They’re also often fanless, which is a major boon. The Dell thin client I wrote about last week has been run through a gauntlet of operating systems to see just how capable it is, and I’m surprise by just how much you can do even with a pedestrian Pentium Silver. For now it’s running Fedora GNOME to get an idea how the most default of default Linux environments performs and feels – so I can include it in future articles about it – but I think I’m going to set it up as a retrogaming console using Batocera. Industrial, office, and thin client computers are just fun to play around with, and they’re incredibly cheap when buying used. If things like a Raspberry Pi are hard to get, backordered, or overpriced due to demand outstripping supply, it’s definitely a good idea to see if you can find some cast-off thin client or whatever for your project instead.

In this release, the FreeBSD base system and kernel have been updated to 1302508, and it contains software updates, some improvements to Update Station, and new features to NetworkMgr. Also, os-generic-userland-devtools has been removed from the default installation to downsize the live system image. GhostBSD is an excellent option if you want a more turnkey FreeBSD-based desktop.

I encountered yet another discussion about OpenBSD PF versus FreeBSD PF. For those who are new to the discussion: OpenBSD developers created PF in 2001, and it rapidly improved to become the most approachable open source packet filter. FreeBSD ported PF over to its kernel in 2004, with occasional updates since. Today a whole bunch of folks who don’t program echo cultish wisdom that one or the other version of PF has fallen behind, not kept up on improvements, or otherwise betrayed their community. My subtler comments have been misinterpreted, so let’s try this. These claims are garbage. Contrary to what the peanut gallery of open source thinks, in general, the rule is that open source teams work together all the time, more often than not across project lines. Of course the OpenBSD developers are working together and sharing code when it comes to things like PF – they most likely share a lot of features and code, and while one of the two versions of PF might get a certain feature first, it will make its way to the other soon enough. These are professionals – not forum posters.

DiscoBSD is a 2.11BSD-based UNIX-like operating system for microcontrollers, with a focus on high portability to memory constrained devices without a memory management unit. This microcontroller-focused operating system is the continuation of RetroBSD, a 2.11BSD-based OS targeting only the MIPS-based PIC32MX7. DiscoBSD is multi-platform, as it also supports Arm Cortex-M4 STM32F4 devices. We mentioned RetroBSD before, way back in 2014 and 2018. Good to see the project is still alive, albeit under a new name.

Hopefully there’s a new ISO/img on the mirrors for DragonFly 6.2.2 by the time you read this – or you can just update your installation. The changelog is short, because this is a bugfix-level release. Also, don’t forget there’s a new set of binary packages out; update that too if you haven’t. Clear as day.

DragonFly version 6.2 is the next step in the 6.x release series. This version has hardware support for type-2 hypervisors with NVMM, an amdgpu driver, the experimental ability to remote-mount HAMMER2 volumes, and many other changes. You can get the new release from the downloads page.

6.0.1 is tagged and available. The major reason for this update is an expired Let’s Encrypt certificate that would cause problems when downloading dpkg binaries. A list of 6.0.1 commits is available. Not a whole lot going on in this release, but still a major bug fix.

I am happy to announce the new ISO 21.09.06. This new ISO contains the switch from OpenRC to FreeBSD rc.d and numerous fixes and improvements. GhostBSD is a desktop-oriented BSD distribution using MATE.

hello (also known as helloSystem) is a desktop system for creators with focus on simplicity, elegance, and usability. Its design follows the “Less, but better” philosophy. It is intended as a system for “mere mortals”, welcoming to switchers from the Mac. FreeBSD is used as the core operating system. With PC-BSD gone, it’s nice to see others step in to fill the void. This particular project was founded by Simon Peter, who also started AppImage and PureDarwin, so there’s quite a bit of pedigree here. It’s still in development and not yet ready for general use.

This release comes with a new live system that leverages ZFS, compression, and replication first introduced in FuryBSD by Joe Maloney. The 20.11.28 release contains numerous improvements, including OS fixes for linuxulator to improve Linux Steam performance, an updated kernel, and GhostBSD userland updates. Userland updates include a MATE desktop upgrade to version 1.24.1, Software Station performance improvements, and numerous application updates. Does anybody have any experiences with Linuxulator? I’m quite curious about its performance compared to running the same binaries on Linux, and just how easy it is to use.

DragonFly version 5.8 brings a new dsynth utility for building your own binary dports packages, plus significant support work to speed up that build – up to and including the entire collection. Additional progress has been made on GPU and signal support. This release’s been out for a while, but I haven’t highlighted it yet, so here we go. They’re already up to 5.8.1 by now.

I am happy to announce the availability of GhostBSD 20.04, but first thanks to all people that gave feedback and reported issues. We fixed a couple of problems that were found in 20.03. This release comes with kernel and OS updates and numerous software applications updates and many improvements like replacing gnome-mount and hald with FreeBSD devd and Vermaden automount which make auto mounting and unmounting of external device way more stable and supports more filesystems. GhostBSD is a desktop-oriented BSD based on FreBSD, running the MATE or Xfce desktop. Linux desktops really take up all the spotlights when it comes to UNIX-like operating systems for average users, and I feel like some honest competition would be a good thing. More focus on desktop-oriented BSD distributions can help.

NetBSD, the highly portable Unix-like Open Source operating system known for its platform diversity, has gained hardware-accelerated virtualization support via an improved NetBSD Virtual Machine Monitor (NVMM). A virtualization API is provided in libnvmm, that allows to easily create and manage virtual machines via NVMM. It’s always nice to see the major BSD distributions gain expanded hardware and software support. It will come as no surprise to anyone that we believe that competition is always a good thing when it comes to operating systems.

DragonFlyBSD 5.0 is the first release with preliminary boot support for HAMMER2, the project's new filesystem.