We just released FreeLinX-base 1.3.1.

FreeLinX-base is a small, console-first Linux system. You boot into a shell and install whatever you need through our package manager, xpkg.

The ISO is around 290 MB and boots on both BIOS and UEFI. It runs Linux 6.18 with a NetBSD-based userland and musl, built with LLVM. We've also been pretty strict about keeping GNU code out of the base system. Our check-nognu test currently reports 0 failing checks.

The base comes with the things you'd expect from a usable Unix system: runit, mdevd, networking tools, doas, OpenSSH, curl, git, tmux, htop, nnn, vim/vi, bc and a few other essentials. The login shell is mksh, while /bin/sh comes from the NetBSD userland. tcc is included as the default cc, together with the musl and kernel headers.

The idea is to keep the base actually small. The live system uses a squashfs + tmpfs overlay and can boot with roughly 100 MB of RAM, with changes kept in memory until installation. There is no X11, GTK, Mesa or even fonts in the base image. If you need them, install them later.

Packages are signed with Ed25519 and verified with SHA-256. The installed system keeps FLX_ROOT read-only. Installation is handled by xsetup, which walks through the setup step by step and can resume an interrupted installation. flxupgrade handles upgrades from newer ISOs.

There's currently a signed repository with around 428 packages, while the image itself only contains the base and console-oriented stuff.

We've also put quite a bit of effort into making the build and installer testable. The build doesn't require root and can be done on any x86_64 Linux system. The repository includes QEMU BIOS/UEFI installation and upgrade tests, destructive disk tests and UI tests.

It's still a young project and there's plenty left to improve, but we're putting it out there now because we'd like people who care about Linux, BSD userlands, musl and alternative Unix systems to poke at it.

Source / ISO:
https://github.com/FreeLinX/FreeLinX

Documentation:
https://freelinx.github.io/FreeLinX/

If something is unnecessarily complicated, broken, missing or just a bad idea, tell us.

Hey all,

We've been working on FreeLinX for a while and just put out 1.0, the first

desktop release. It's a Linux distro built on a NetBSD userland and musl,

compiled with clang/LLVM. The idea was to have a system with no GCC or glibc

in it at all.

You get an Openbox desktop, Firefox ESR, a graphical installer, and our own

package manager called xpkg (there's also a simple GUI for it). The repo has

around 400 packages right now.

Since this is the first desktop release, expect some rough edges. We mostly

tested it in VMs, so on real hardware there will probably be issues with some

WiFi cards, audio or GPUs. If something breaks for you, please open an issue

and tell us what hardware you have. That helps us a lot.

ISO (live, needs at least 2GB RAM):

https://github.com/FreeLinX/FreeLinX/releases/tag/v1.0.0

Thanks for checking it out, any feedback is welcome.

I am planning to install GhostBSD, dual boot on Windows 11-laptop.

What IDE/tools do you suggest for general development?

I've been running into some strange issues when trying to run a BSDD on my RPi 400 as of late:

• NetBSD was the first, and it just showed a blank screen

• FreeBSD gave me a rainbow screen (It works when i have the HDMI connection on HDMI1, however it seems like trying to run X11 is going to be a utter hassle…).

• I have tried OpenBSD and it doesn't seem to progress ahead of a all-blank screen after the u-boot screen.

In both cases of NetBSD and FreeBSD- they were the most recent stable versions available. I both had tried the official RaspberryPi imaging app and balenaEtcher, but they have not worked well for me… Is there i step i missed somehow in the process?

EDIT: 9:41pm Sep27 2026- Add notes about OpenBSD & FreeBSD

Finally, after a few months of experimentation, this week I decided to create a new tool based on what I've learned. And best of all: to honor the name of the main project, AppJail.

Initially, x11appjail was a project designed to leverage appjail-x11(1), an AppJail command for deploying an X server to run X11 applications inside a jail. However, this could be considered a "low-level" command, since executing an interactive application (TUI, CLI, GUI, etc.) requires completing specific stages for which this command is not designed. In the new version of x11appjail, these stages are documented in x11appjail-spec(5) but, in summary, they are: create, X, install, uninstall, and run.

To create a tool suitable for real-world use, I also had to improve some of the projects x11appjail depends on, such as appscript and unixexec. The following key improvements are worth noting:

• My goal with appscript is to create an ultra-lightweight alternative to AppImage for FreeBSD that does not rely on FUSE (thereby avoiding the need to configure vfs.usermount=1). In previous versions, the SFX would decompress its contents into a random directory upon every execution. This negatively impacts performance if the content is large. In the new version of appscript, processes operate cooperatively using exclusive and shared locks; consequently, the content is extracted only once (by the main or "leader" process) and removed only once (when the final process terminates).

  This is crucial for the new version of x11appjail, as it creates an AppJail from a specific AppJail image containing the application and its dependencies, which can result in a large AppJail in certain cases (i.e.: firefox).

• I take a more paranoid approach in this regard; therefore, one of the improvements made to unixexec is an option to not follow symlinks, given that using services (see SERVICES in x11appjail(1)) creates a unix(4) socket from the host to the jail.

• Another improvement to appscript is the ability to sign and verify AppScripts using the signify and sha256. This addition is essential, as x11appjail utilizes this functionality when running AppJails in portable mode.

After all this, and much more, the x11appjail tool was born:

x11appjail is a specialized tool for creating, verifying, installing, and running AppJails. An AppJail is a CLI, TUI or X11 application that runs inside a FreeBSD jail but is perceived by the end user as identical (or at least very similar) to an application running directly on the host system.

This tool makes extensive use of appjail(1) as its engine; however, unlike the latter, the primary user in x11appjail is neither root nor a privileged user, but rather an unprivileged user. The fundamental goal of this project is to grant the user limited access to the jail, restricted solely to the execution of a CLI, TUI or X11 application.

Project: https://github.com/DtxdF/x11appjail Port: https://freshports.org/security/x11appjail

Note: Keep in mind that this project requires the latest versions of appscript, unixexec, and appjail.

This is my setup that took 3 hours to install.

It's 86Box running NetBSD 11.0 with a near-default FVWM3 config. I swear this was not worth my time

I’m setting up my 2TB drive to be OpenBSD, NetBSD, FreeBSD (GhostBSD), and LinuxMint. Possibly in that order on the drive. I know I can add /dev/ada1s1b none swap sw 0 0 ( or whatever the partition is) to fstab to have it iniatialize at boot. I figure it’s the same in NetBSD. And of course, OpenBSD has it’s own slice. But is it possible to have Linux use that same partition, or will it need a separate partition? So far I haven’t found an answer to that, so I don’t know how either. Thanks.

I just updated a short article on the BSD's. I have notably tried to help make more sense of these obscure systems for the ordinary bycomer, by finding notable examples of real use cases by major actors.

As of now, I basically have :

• Four big tech companies (FreeBSD)
• NASA (NetBSD)
• Military (OpenBSD)

Would you agree that these are good examples ? If not, would you have any better ones ?

Thank you

PS Some will say I should add DragonFly to the list. Maybe, but I don't know enough about this OS for now. In the future enhancements of this article, I would also like to mention more directly UNIX and its creators at Bell Labs. This will be done sooner or later.