This is so particular: on the day that I moved Frenzy to the inactive/no-longer-maintained section a new release was announced.

After being formally discontinued by its creator, Sergei Mozhaisky, a number of developers headed by Egor Vershinin has taken over the work.

Frenzy is a FreeBSD-based live CD featuring a variety of security, system testing, networking and penetration tools, has now been resurrected (the last version was release 12/2008).

“Frenzy 1.2 ‘reincarnation’ (community release) is out. It is based on FreeBSD 8.0 and available in 2 editions – lite and standard. This is a first version of Frenzy that isn’t made by me – the author of this build is Egor Vershinin.”

The developers have set up a new web site at frenzy.bspu.ru, with some documentation and a changelog, but it’s currently in Russian only. The project’s original web site at frenzy.org.ua also has some information about the new release. The “lite” edition of Frenzy only includes command line tools, but the “standard” edition comes with X.Org and Fluxbox.

Download the English variant from here: frenzy-1.2-reincarnation-en-release.iso

Many thanks to Dalibor – Edmondas, Lars (LME) and AxelBSD for emailing me regarding the new update.

I contacted Sergei Mozhaisky, the Frenzy Administrator LiveCD developer, for his reasons (which he blogged about on his Russion blog) to stop with the development of Frenzy BSD.

I made Frenzy 5 years ago because I needed it in my work. I was a system administrator (first at university, then in local ISPs) and Frenzy helped me a lot in my everyday tasks. FreeBSD is a popular server system in ex-USSR, so Frenzy quickly become popular among russian-speaking sysadmin community.

But life is unpredictable. In March 2008 I’ve left my sysadmin job and became a freelance programmer. Since this I’ve never used Frenzy for my work, so motivation for further development is lost. Also I have not so much free time as before…

Another reason for stopping is that there are no other developers joining and sharing the workload.

The second problem is that I was only one developer. My efforts to create a community for group develoment was failed, most of those who make some progress soon create their own distrubutions instead of collective work.

Further development if Frenzy will take a lot of time and is too heavy now for only one developer.

If anybody is interested in continuing the project, the source codes for build scripts can be obtained via SVN:

• SourceForge Frenzy Project Page
• Wiki (Russian)

It would be really good if this project could be continued.

Sergei Mozhaisky has announced the release of Frenzy 1.1, a FreeBSD-based toolkit for system and network administrators. It is sad, but this version will be the project’s last release:

At last, Frenzy 1.1 is released. This is a final release of Frenzy, I decided to discontinue the development of this project.” What’s new? “Added Unionfs support; introduced FEM (Frenzy Extension Modules) system, which allows to plug-in additional software without rebuilding ISO image; Frenzy can now be booted from ISO image on hard drive; added options to boot with DMA disabled on ATAPI or ATA devices; added parameters to loader menu – ‘mode’ to choose resolution in console mode, ‘sound’ for sound card auto-detection, ‘nofem’ to disable FEM modules search and loading; added feature to use FAT partition as boot partition; bug fixes.

Read the detailed release notes for a complete list of changes and new features.

I’ve always liked Frenzy, and it was nice to have a BSD variant of nUbuntu (though not exactly the same). Frenzy is open source and hopefully someone else will take over and carry on with the project.

Sergei Mozhaisky has announced the third beta release of Frenzy 1.1, a portable toolkit for system and network administrators based on FreeBSD 6.2. More info on Frenzy here.

These are most important changes since the 1.0-release:

• Base system is FreeBSD 6.2-STABLE, Xorg updated to 7.3.
• System totally moved to unionfs file system organization, you can edit almost all files after boot.
• Added Frenzy Extension Module support, utility for FEM creation is avaiable on FTP server.
• Added ability to boot from ISO-file on HDD
• Boot options with disabled ATAPI DMA or ATA DMA
• Loader option “mode” (select console resolution)
• Loader option “sound” (sound card auto-detection)
• Added options for work with serial console
• gcc removed from base system, it will be available as FEM module.
• More than 100 applications added (among them ntfs-3g) and 18 applications removed.

You can download the ISO here.

If you come across any bugs or problems or you want feedback, just drop a message on the Frenzy Forum.

After a long period of silence the development of Frenzy will be continued. The next version will be more sysadmin-oriented (most of desktop applications will be removed and installation to HDD will be disabled).

Since unionfs is usuable in FreeBSD now, Frenzy will heavily use it’s advantages. The most notable feature is Frenzy Extension Modules (FEM), which allow to add applications to LiveCD/LiveUSB without rebuilding (similar feature in Damn Small Linux and SLAX).

Public beta build of Frenzy 1.1 will be available soon.

Source : Frenzy forum (16/11/2007)