Probably 90% of the Linux distros out there are supposed to be newbie friendly. You also see a few distros, such as Gentoo or Slackware, designed for advanced users. But you rarely see a distro for “intermediate users.” Frugalware is one of those few distros. According to the Frugalware site, Frugalware is “a general purpose linux distribution, designed for intermediate users (who are not afraid of text mode).”

Upon booting up the live CD, you are greeted by a nice terminal. No graphical interface. Quite unusual in modern distros. Accompanying that, though, was a helpful explanation of what to do, which is important since you need to know the username and password and because you have to use the command xstart, not startx, to get into any sort of GUI.

Once you login and type “xstart” you are taken into a familiar KDE 3.5 environment. Despite the almost total lack of Frugalware branding, the theme used is quite nice.

Since part of Frugalware’s philosophy is to not mess with upstream applications, you are unlikely to discover many changes from a default KDE setup plus added applications.

The most recent stable release of Frugalware came in March of this year when 0.8 (Kalgan) was released. The next stable release, 0.9 (Solaria), is expected in September, but you can, of course, always check out the development releases.

If you are finding some of the more popular distros too newbie-friendly and you want a geekier distro, without going all the way to Gentoo, you might want to check out Frugalware.

This entry was posted on Friday, August 15th, 2008 at 4:57 pm and is filed under Distros. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.