Frugalware Linux has been a general-purpose Linux distribution designed for intermediate users who are familiar with command-line operations. Early versions were based on

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

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

Pacman originally called ''Puck Man'' in Japan, is a 1980 maze action video game developed and released by Namco for arcades. In North America, the game was released by Midway Manufacturing as part of its licensing agreement with Namco America. ...

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 w ...

from

Arch Linux Arch Linux () is an independently developed, x86-64 general-purpose Linux distribution that strives to provide the latest stable versions of most software by following a rolling-release model. The default installation is a minimal base system, ...

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 scripts and build system, and added

, 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

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 (sometimes shortened to Sci-Fi or SF) is a genre of speculative fiction which typically deals with imaginative and futuristic concepts such as advanced science and technology, space exploration, time travel, parallel uni ...

books by Isaac Asimov.

References

External links

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