MidnightBSD gets a new package manager

A new package manager and better hardware support are the major changes in MidnightBSD 0.4, an derivative of the better known FreeBSD 9.1. The release pulls in features from FreeBSD 9.1 such as ZFS with ZPOOL 28/dedup support, LLVM+CLANG, a migration to GPT as the installer default and the newer FreeBSD USB stack and NFSv4 client. This is the first new release following more than three years of development work. ISO images and images for VMware and Parallels are available to download from the web site and various mirrors.

Unlike version 0.3, which was based on the old FreeBSD 7.0, the packages in the MidnightBSD 0.4 repository will be maintained on an ongoing basis, as is the norm for FreeBSD and most Linux distributions. There is also a new package manager in the form of "mport". Some things haven't changed though; the system compiler is still GCC 4.2 but it has been updated to a newer release.

In updating the kernel, hardware support in MidnightBSD 0.4 has also been improved and it is now able to deal with Sandy Bridge and Ivy Bridge graphics and various WiFi and network adapters from Intel and Realtek. There are also updates for bzip, diffutils, openssh, SQLite, MKSH, Perl, mDNSresponder, less, sendmail and sudo. The developers are planning a stability-oriented release next and then plan on implementing enhancements to the desktop functionality.

(djwm)