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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.

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.

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.

Package management


Frugalware does not have its own package manager but instead uses Pacman. Frugalware's packages' extension is .fpm to differentiate them from regular tarballs. Starting from 0.3pre1 an extra tool was added: repoman. It helps compile packages from source, allowing automatic creation and installation of closed-source packages. It also allows the user to download all package's buildscript (repoman update) and recompile them with specified compiler flags, "à la Gentoo".

Branches


Frugalware has a current, a testing and a stable branch. The current branch is updated daily, packages are pushed to testing about every two month, and the stable branch gets updated every 6 months.

Architectures


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.

Releases


* 0.1 (Genesis) – November 2, 2004
* 0.2 (Aurora) – April 28, 2005
* 0.3 (Trantor) – October 13, 2005 and October 19, 2005 (for x86_64 port)
* 0.4 (Wanda) – March 30, 2006
* 0.5 (Siwenna) – September 14, 2006

According to the Frugalware development roadmap, the next stable version "Terminus" is going to be released in March 22, 2007.
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