Shulou(Shulou.com)06/01 Report--

This article mainly shows you "FreeBSD how to install MidnightBSD", the content is easy to understand, clear, hope to help you solve your doubts, the following let the editor lead you to study and learn "FreeBSD how to install MidnightBSD" this article.

FreeBSD is an open source operating system derived from the famous Berkeley software suite Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD). The first version of FreeBSD was released in 1993 and continues to evolve. Around 2007, Lucas Holt wanted to create a branch of FreeBSD using the Objective-C framework of OpenStep (now Cocoa), the widget toolkit, and the GnuStep implementation of application development tools. To this end, he began to develop a MidnightBSD desktop distribution.

MidnightBSD (named after Lucas's cat Midnight) is still actively (albeit slowly) developing. Starting from August 2017, the latest stable release version (0.8.6) is available (LCTT translation note: as of the time of release, it is currently version 1.2 released in 2019-10-31). Although the BSD distribution is not what you call a user-friendly distribution, getting started with installation is a good way to get familiar with the ncurses installation process and complete the installation from the command line.

In this way, you will end up with a very reliable desktop distribution of the FreeBSD branch. It takes a little bit of effort, but if you are a Linux user looking to expand your skills... This is a good starting point.

I'll walk you through the process of installing MidnightBSD, how to add a graphical desktop environment, and then how to install applications.

Installation

As I mentioned, this is a ncurses installation process, so there is no place to click here with the mouse. Instead, you will use the Tab and arrow keys of your keyboard. After you download the latest release, burn it to a CD/DVD or USB drive and start your machine (or create a virtual machine in VirtualBox). The installer will open and give you three options (figure 1). Use the arrow keys of your keyboard to select "Install" and press enter.

Figure 1: start the MidnightBSD installer.

You have to go through a lot of screens here. Many of these screens are clear at a glance:

Hongmeng official Strategic Cooperation to build HarmonyOS Technology Community

Set non-default keyboard mapping (Yes / No)

Set host name

Add optional system components (documentation, games, 32-bit compatibility, system source code)

Partition the hard disk

Administrator password

Configure network interfac

Select region (time zone)

Enable services (such as ssh)

Add users (figure 2)

Figure 2: adding a user to the system.

After you add users to the system, you will be taken to a window (figure 3) where you can deal with anything you may forget to configure or you want to reconfigure. If you don't need to make any changes, select "Exit" and your configuration will be applied.

Figure 3: apply your configuration.

In the next window, when prompted, select "No" and the system will restart. After MidnightBSD restarts, you are ready for the next phase of installation.

Post-installation stage

When your newly installed MidnightBSD starts, you will find yourself at the command prompt. At the moment, there is no graphical interface. To install the application, MidnightBSD relies on the mport tool. Let's say you want to install the Xfce desktop environment. To do this, log in to MidnightBSD and issue the following command:

Sudo mport indexsudo mport install xorg

You have now installed the Xorg window server, which allows you to install the desktop environment. Use the command to install Xfce:

Sudo mport install xfce

Xfce is now installed. However, we must enable it along with the command startx. To do this, let's install the nano editor first. Issue an order:

Sudo mport install nano

As nano is installed, issue the command:

Nano / .xinitrc

This file contains only one line:

Exec startxfce4

Save and close the file. If you issue the command startx now, the Xfce desktop environment will start. You should feel a little familiar (figure 4).

Figure 4: the Xfce desktop interface is ready for service.

Because you don't always want to have to issue the command startx, you want to enable the login daemon. However, it is not installed. To install this subsystem, issue the command:

Sudo mport install mlogind

When the installation is complete, enable mlogind at startup by adding a project to the / etc/rc.conf file. At the bottom of the rc.conf file, add the following:

Mlogind_enable= "YES"

Save and close the file. Now, when you start (or restart) the machine, you should see a graphical login screen. At the time of writing this article, I finally got a blank screen and a pesky X cursor after logging in. Unfortunately, there seems to be no solution to this problem at present. So, to access your desktop environment, you must use the startx command.

Install the application

By default, you can't find many applications that are available. If you try to install applications using mport, you will soon feel frustrated because only a few applications can be found. To solve this problem, we need to use the svnlite command to view the list of available mport software that is checked out. Go back to the terminal window and issue the command:

Svnlite co http://svn.midnightbsd.org/svn/mports/trunk mports

After you have done this, you should see a new directory named ~ / mports. Use the command cd ~ / .mports to change to this directory. Issue the ls command, and you should see many categories (figure 5).

Figure 5: application categories now available for mport.

Do you want to install Firefox? If you look at the www directory, you will see a list of linux-firefox. Issue an order:

Sudo mport install linux-firefox

You should now see a Firefox item in the Xfce desktop menu. Search all the categories and use the mport command to install all the software you need.

A sad warning.

A sad little warning is that the only version of the office suite that mport (via svnlite) can find is OpenOffice 3. It's very out of date. Although Abiword can be found in the ~ / mports/editors directory, it doesn't seem to be installable. Even after installing OpenOffice 3, it outputs an execution format error. In other words, you can't use MidnightBSD to do a lot of things about office productivity. But, hey, if you happen to have an old Palm Pilot around you, you can install pilot-link. In other words, the available software is not enough to make an extremely useful desktop distribution. At least not for ordinary users. However, if you want to develop on MidnightBSD, you will find many available tools to install (see the ~ / mports/devel directory). You can even use the command to install Drupal:

Sudo mport install drupal7

After that, of course, you will need to create a database (MySQL is already installed), install Apache (sudo mport install apache24), and configure the necessary Apache configuration.

Obviously, what is installed and can be installed is a hodgepodge of applications, systems, and services. But with enough work, you can eventually get a distribution that can serve a special purpose.

The above is all the contents of the article "how to install MidnightBSD in FreeBSD". Thank you for reading! I believe we all have a certain understanding, hope to share the content to help you, if you want to learn more knowledge, welcome to follow the industry information channel!

Welcome to subscribe "Shulou Technology Information " to get latest news, interesting things and hot topics in the IT industry, and controls the hottest and latest Internet news, technology news and IT industry trends.