Frugalware - AbsoluteAstronomy.com

Frugalware Linux is a general-purpose Linux distribution

Linux distribution

A Linux distribution is a member of the family of Unix-like operating systems built on top of the Linux kernel. Such distributions are operating systems including a large collection of software applications such as word processors, spreadsheets, media players, and database applications...

designed for intermediate users who are familiar with command-line operations. Early versions were based on Slackware

Slackware

Slackware is a free and open source Linux-based operating system. It was one of the earliest operating systems to be built on top of the Linux kernel and is the oldest currently being maintained. Slackware was created by Patrick Volkerding of Slackware Linux, Inc. in 1993...

, but it is now an independently-developed distribution. Frugalware uses the Pacman package management system

Package management system

In software, a package management system, also called package manager, is a collection of software tools to automate the process of installing, upgrading, configuring, and removing software packages for a computer's operating system in a consistent manner...

Aims

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.

History

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

Package management system

pkgtools too slow, and wanted to rewrite it in C

C (programming language)

C is a general-purpose computer programming language developed between 1969 and 1973 by Dennis Ritchie at the Bell Telephone Laboratories for use with the Unix operating system....

. 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 package manager, init

Init

init is a program for Unix-based computer operating systems that spawns all other processes. It runs as a daemon and typically has PID 1. The boot loader starts the kernel and the kernel starts init...

scripts and build system. As a result, Frugalware was born.

Package management

Since version 0.6 Frugalware has used 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

xz is a lossless data compression file format incorporating the LZMA2 compression algorithm. Like gzip and bzip2, concatenation is supported to compress multiple files, but the convention is to bundle a file that is an archive itself, such as those created by the tar or cpio Unix...

.

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

Frugalware currently supports x86 (Pentium Pro or higher), x86_64 (k8, aka. amd64) platforms and ppc (PowerPC).

Releases

Version	Codename	Release date	Notes
0.1	Genesis	November 2, 2004
0.2	Aurora	April 28, 2005
0.3	Trantor	October 13, 2005	October 19, 2005 (for x86-64 port)
0.4	Wanda	March 30, 2006
0.5	Siwenna	September 14, 2006
0.6	Terminus	March 22, 2007
0.7	Sayshell	October 13, 2007
0.8	Kalgan	March 11, 2008
0.9	Solaria	September 9, 2008
1.0	Anacreon	March 22, 2009
1.1	Getorin	September 7, 2009
1.2	Locris	March 8, 2010
1.3	Haven	August 23, 2010
1.4	Nexon	February 13, 2011
1.5	Mores	August 15, 2011

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

Science fiction

Science fiction is a genre of fiction dealing with imaginary but more or less plausible content such as future settings, futuristic science and technology, space travel, aliens, and paranormal abilities...

books by Isaac Asimov

Isaac Asimov