14 DAY TRIAL // The GhostBSD developers announced on August 10, 2016, the general availability of the first RC (Release Candidate) development milestone towards the upcoming GhostBSD 10.3 operating system.
GhostBSD 10.3 has been in development for quite some time now, since spring 2016, and it looks like the final release gets closer and closer now that the Release Candidate 1 build is available for public testing. This time, both the MATE and Xfce editions have been made available for download to early adopters.
If you're wondering what's new in GhostBSD 10.3 RC1, we can tell you that the Slim login manager has been added instead of GNOME's GDM, there's full support for UEFI (Unified Extensible Firmware Interface) systems, and several issues have been fixed for NetworkManager, including a tray icon crash and a long SSID name bug.
Moreover, a problem with the installer when creating custom partitions was resolved, as well as issues with UEFI and /boot partitions. 4k partition alignment should work as expected now, and it looks like Raid-Z and ZFS Mirror support was added to the installer, which should work flawlessly on VirtualBox machines.
And now for the bad news, the promised ZFS filesystem disk encryption was pushed back to the next major release of the BSD-based operating system, GhostBSD 11, which will be based on FreeBSD 11.0. Until then, you can download GhostBSD 10.3 RC1 MATE and GhostBSD 10.3 RC1 Xfce ISOs right now via our website and take the OS for a test drive.
When testing a development release of a software product, please try to keep in mind that it's exactly that, a pre-release build, not suitable for production use. Also, be aware of the known issues, such as the Slim login manager not respecting the keyboard layout, which after installation is still in English.