NomadBSD is a persistent live system for USB flash drives, based on FreeBSD®. Together with automatic hardware detection and setup, it is configured to be used as a desktop system that works out of the box, but can also be used for data recovery, for educational purposes, or to test FreeBSD®'s hardware compatibility.
The images for 64-bit and 32-bit computers fit on a >=5GB USB flash drive. A system with a 1.2GHz CPU and 1G of RAM (2G for the ZFS version) should be able to run NomadBSD decently. Booting is possible via BIOS and UEFI.
Changes since 20210508
The base system has been changed to FreeBSD 13.1-RELEASE-p5. Except for i386, We now provide two images for each supported architecture. One which uses ZFS and one which uses UFS for the root filesystem. The file systems used on the UFS version are now created with soft updates journaling enabled to reduce file system repair problems after a crash. The automatic graphics driver detection has been improved. Support for VIA/Openchrome has been added. For Nvidia graphics card not supported by one of the Nvidia drivers nv is now used. For better support of non-latin keyboard input and switching between layouts, IBus is now used. The rc script for loading acpi modules has been improved. The display manager SLiM has been replaced by SDDM. In order to reduce image sizes, libreOffice and some multimedia packages have been removed. The kernel has been build with a patch that prevents some laptops from hanging when the hwpstate_intel driver is loaded. See: https://cgit.freebsd.org/src/commit/?id=67f2a563bfcad75c16536ca500b06ddc9306dfa0 Turkish localization and support for Opera and Microsoft Edge have been added to the Linux browser installer GUI. An experimental nomadbsd-update tool has been added, which allows to update components of the NomadBSD system.
