Frugalware Linux is a general-purpose

Linux distribution A Linux distribution, often abbreviated as distro, is an operating system that includes the Linux kernel for its kernel functionality. Although the name does not imply product distribution per se, a distro—if distributed on its own—is oft ...

designed for intermediate users who are familiar with

command-line A command-line interface (CLI) is a means of interacting with software via commands each formatted as a line of text. Command-line interfaces emerged in the mid-1960s, on computer terminals, as an interactive and more user-friendly alternativ ...

operations. Early versions were based on

Slackware Slackware is a Linux distribution created by Patrick Volkerding in 1993. Originally based on Softlanding Linux System (SLS), Slackware has been the basis for many other Linux distributions, most notably the first versions of SUSE Linux distr ...

, but it later became an independently developed distribution. Frugalware makes use of the Pacman

package management system A package manager or package management system is a collection of software tools that automates the process of installing, upgrading, configuring, and removing computer programs for a computer in a consistent manner. A package manager deals wi ...

from

Arch Linux Arch Linux () is an Open-source software, open source, rolling release Linux distribution. Arch Linux is kept up-to-date by regularly updating the individual pieces of software that it comprises. Arch Linux is intentionally minimal, and is meant ...

History

Frugalware was founded in 2004 by Miklós Vajna. He considered Slackware's

package manager A package manager or package management system is a collection of software tools that automates the process of installing, upgrading, configuring, and removing computer programs for a computer in a consistent manner. A package manager deals wi ...

''pkgtools'' too slow, and wanted to rewrite it in C. He was told that it would never be accepted by Slackware, so Vajna started to think about founding a separate Linux distribution. He replaced Slackware's original

init In Unix-based computer operating systems, init (short for ''initialization'') is the first process started during booting of the operating system. Init is a daemon process that continues running until the system is shut down. It is the direc ...

scripts and build system, and added Pacman, the package manager from

. As a result, Frugalware was born.

Package management

Since version 0.6 Frugalware has used the Pacman-G2 package manager. 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. Previously Frugalware used a modified version of the older, monolithic Pacman by Judd Vinet. Frugalware's packages' extension is .fpm. The packages are archives that are compressed using xz. Repoman is a tool to compile source packages and automatically create and install closed-source packages. 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. The first Frugalware release that had Repoman was Frugalware 0.3pre1.

Branches

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

Architectures

From the official web site, 2012: "Frugalware currently supports x86 (Pentium Pro or higher) and x86_64 (k8, aka. amd64) platforms".

Releases

All the Frugalware releases except "Genesis" have been named after planets in

science fiction Science fiction (often shortened to sci-fi or abbreviated SF) is a genre of speculative fiction that deals with imaginative and futuristic concepts. These concepts may include information technology and robotics, biological manipulations, space ...

books by

Isaac Asimov Isaac Asimov ( ; – April 6, 1992) was an Russian-born American writer and professor of biochemistry at Boston University. During his lifetime, Asimov was considered one of the "Big Three" science fiction writers, along with Robert A. H ...

References

External links

* * {{Linux-distro Linux distributions offering KDE desktop environment Pacman-based Linux distributions Slackware X86-64 Linux distributions Linux distributions