Frugalware is a general purpose linux distribution, designed for intermediate users (who are not afraid of text mode).

Frugalware Linux is an independently developed general purpose desktop Linux distribution designed for intermediate users.

It follows simple Slackware-like design concepts and includes the "pacman" package management utility from Arch Linux.

Frugalware was founded in 2004 by Miklós Vajna. He considered Slackware's package manager 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 package manager, init scripts and build system. As a result, Frugalware was born.

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 tar archives that are compressed using bzip2, not gzip like the packages used by Pacman of Arch Linux. Bzip2 archives have smaller file size but longer unpacking-time compared to gzip archives.

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

Update:

Miklós Vajna has announced the release of Frugalware Linux 1.4, an independent community distribution with a large software repository and Arch's Pacman package management tool: "The Frugalware developer team is pleased to announce the immediate availability of Frugalware 1.4, our fourteenth stable release. The only added feature since 1.4rc2 is LibreOffice; additionally, 109 changes have been made to fix minor bugs. If you didn't follow the changes during the development releases, here are the most important changes since 1.3: updated packages - Linux kernel 2.6.37, X.Org Server 1.9, GNOME 2.32, KDE SC 4.5, Drupal 7, Python 2.7 to name a few major components; missing KOffice localization packages are back; new LCD font rendering available in GNOME; OSS 4 has been added; systemd is now available as an alternative to sysvinit...."

Read the rest of the release announcement for further details.

Download the installation DVD images from here: frugalware-1.4-x86_64-dvd1.iso (4,284MB, SHA1), frugalware-1.4-x86_64-dvd1.iso (4,284MB, SHA1).

Recent releases:

• 2011-02-13: Distribution Release: Frugalware Linux 1.4
• 2011-01-28: Development Release: Frugalware Linux 1.4 RC2
• 2011-01-10: Development Release: Frugalware Linux 1.4 RC1
• 2010-12-13: Development Release: Frugalware Linux 1.4 Pre 2
• 2010-10-18: Development Release: Frugalware Linux 1.4 Pre 1
• 2010-08-23: Distribution Release: Frugalware Linux 1.3

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 tar archives that are compressed using bzip2, not gzip like the packages used by Pacman of Arch Linux.Bzip2 archives have smaller file size but longer unpacking-time compared to gzip archives.

Repoman is a tool to compile source packages and automatically create and install closed-source packages.[8] 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.

Frugalware currently supports x86 and x86-64 microprocessor architectures. The x86 packages are optimized for i686 processors, and the 0.3pre1 was the first release that also had an x86_64 port.

Screenshots: