Frugalware

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**Frugalware Linux**
Frugalware logo
Website:	www.frugalware.org
Company/ developer:	Miklós Vajna
OS family:	Linux
Source model:	Open source
Latest stable release:	0.6 / March 22, 2007
Kernel type:	Monolithic kernel
License:	GPL
Working state:	Current

Frugalware Linux is a Slackware-based Linux distribution founded by Miklós Vajna. It is a general purpose Linux distribution, designed for intermediate users who are familiar with command-line operations. Frugalware is one of the few distributions which offer daily updated software packages and security announcemments. According to Distrowatch ^[1] Frugalware is the most popular distribution from Hungary.

1 Philosophy
2 Overview
3 Package management
4 Branches
5 Architectures
6 Releases
7 See also
8 References
9 External links

[edit] Philosophy

Frugalware's developers attempt to make Frugalware as simple as possible while establishing a priority based on comfortable use. Their goal is to ship consistently fresh and stable software, as close to the original source as possible.

[edit] Overview

From the Slackware-Red Hat Linux-Debian trio Miklós was most pleased with Slackware, but that has some serious imperfections: for example the slow package manager, the absence of multilanguage support and the native automatic package update. Frugalware tries to drop nothing from Slackware's advantages (simplicity, speed, etc), while refining it.

[edit] Package management

Since version 0.6 Frugalware has used Pacman-G2 package manager.^[2] It is a fork of a CVS version of the complete rewrite of Pacman by Aurelien Foret, which was not officially released at the time.^[3] Previously Frugalware used a modified version of the older, monolithic Pacman by Judd Vinet.

Frugalware's packages' extension is .fpm to differentiate them from regular tarballs. The packages are compressed using bzip2, which results in smaller downloads but longer unpacking-time compared to gzip (used by the regular Pacman package manager).

Repoman is a tool to compile source packages. In addition, it is possible to automatically create and install closed-source packages with Repoman.^[4] With Repoman, the user can also download all packages' buildscript and recompile them with specific build options. The build options can be changed by editing a configuration file.^[5] The first Frugalware release that had Repoman was Frugalware 0.3pre1. ^[4]

[edit] Branches

Frugalware has a -current and a -stable branch. The -current branch is updated daily, and the -stable branch gets updated every 6 months.^[6]

[edit] Architectures

Frugalware currently supports x86 and x86_64 microprocessor architectures.^[6] The x86 packages are optimized for i686 processors, and the 0.3pre1 was the first release that also had an x86_64 port.

[edit] Releases

0.1 (Genesis) – November 2, 2004
0.2 (Aurora) – April 28, 2005
0.3 (Trantor) – October 13, 2005 (for x86 port)^[7] and October 19, 2005 (for x86_64 port)^[8]

0.4 (Wanda) – March 30, 2006
0.5 (Siwenna) – September 14, 2006
0.6 (Terminus) – March 22, 2007

According to the Frugalware development roadmap, the next stable version "Sayshell" is going to be released in October 6, 2007.^[9]

[edit] See also

[edit] References

^ Distrowatch
^ Frugalware 0.6 (Terminus) Changelog (TXT). Frugalware Project. Retrieved on March 28, 2007.
^ Pacman-G2 (HTML). Frugalware 0.6 (Terminus) Documentation. Frugalware Project. Retrieved on March 28, 2007.
^ ^a ^b Frugalware 0.3pre1-i686 released (HTML). Frugalware Project. Retrieved on April 2, 2007.
^ Creating new packages (HTML). Frugalware 0.6 (Terminus) Documentation. Frugalware Project. Retrieved on April 2, 2007.
^ ^a ^b About Frugalware (HTML). Frugalware 0.6 (Terminus) Documentation. Frugalware Project. Retrieved on March 28, 2007.
^ Frugalware 0.3-i686 released (HTML). Frugalware Project. Retrieved on April 2, 2007.
^ Frugalware 0.3-x86_64 released (HTML). Frugalware Project. Retrieved on April 2, 2007.
^ Frugalware Roadmap (HTML). Frugalware Project. Retrieved on March 23, 2007.