11/29/2020

Meet helloSystem, a new desktop system built on FreeBSD.

Say Hello to helloSystem

While desktop environments on the FreeBSD Project are not usually known for it’s slick & stylish user interfaces, helloSystem attempts to change that. HelloSystem is a desktop system built to pay homage to Apple’s Macintosh Human Interface Guidelines and as such is designed with simplicity in mind. The pre-alpha release hopes to welcome Mac users with an UI that feels familiar and cozy to MacOS but coming with all the benefits of FreeBSD and the immense amount of documentation that comes with the operating system. Simon Peter, the founder of the project provides this insight into the mission “We are not aiming to create a 1:1 replica, but something that is generally consistent with the underlying general user experience (UX) philosophy, which has been openly documented.” It will be interesting to see how this project progresses.

Why Does FreeBSD Matter?

We love FreeBSD. We really really love FreeBSD. Why? FreeBSD allows us to provide IT solutions for our clients on a wide area of systems everyday. It’s Unix based operating system is flexible, secure & highly customizable. This rich customization allows us to adapt distributions to an abundance of different managed systems: Mail Relays/Servers, On-Premise or Enterprise NAS devices, Perimeter Firewall Appliances, Webservers & many more. FreeBSD supports “FreeBSD Jails” an internal mechanism to partition a FreeBSD system into several independent systems – called “jails” – which have the ability to assign an IP address for each system and configuration. This level of access control allows resources to only see and use the components they are supposed to. These jails can be thin (shared base OS version) or thick (individual OS version), allowing us the flexibility of using different FreeBSD versions on the same piece of hardware and tailoring each instance for a specific intended purpose. The jail architecture is also extremely useful in creating honeypots to track hackers, as an exploit into a specific jail does not allow processes to ‘see’ out of their jails, or into other jails. FreeBSD proves to be a core system we love to use in our networked environments.

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