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#1 2006-02-11 22:45:16

ihavenoname
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Registered: 2006-01-09
Posts: 198

Frugalware & Arch

Hey I was looking at Frugalware and it seemed very intresting but im not exactly sure what the diffrence is btwn Frugalware and Arch..except maybe that frugalware installs alot more packages out of box. but it looks really nice. Has anyone tried it and could they please tell me what the diffrences are how fast it is etc. or any information at all about Frugalware and how it compares to Arch? Also does it include the ability to upgrade to the next version w/o having to download the isos?

note : this is not ment as an insult to arch in anyway im just curious about other distros. I love arch and will probably continue using it.


In this land of the pain the sane lose not knowing they were part of the game.

~LP

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#2 2006-02-11 22:55:54

Dusty
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From: Medicine Hat, Alberta, Canada
Registered: 2004-01-18
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Re: Frugalware & Arch

I understand that the only similarity between frugalware and arch is pacman. Frugalware apparently uses different initscripts, different config setup, etc. I haven't used it yet, so this is all just heresay.

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#3 2006-02-11 23:31:22

lucke
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From: Poland
Registered: 2004-11-30
Posts: 4,018

Re: Frugalware & Arch

Installed it once on friend's PC. First thing that struck me is that it uses SysV - it's far from the beauty and simplicity of Arch's initscripts and rc.conf (had to use chkconfig to disable daemons, argh). Didn't dig deep, but actually the only thing I liked about it was pacman ;-)

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#4 2006-02-12 01:20:15

ihavenoname
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Registered: 2006-01-09
Posts: 198

Re: Frugalware & Arch

hmmm thats intresting...how about for speed? was it fast?


In this land of the pain the sane lose not knowing they were part of the game.

~LP

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#5 2006-02-12 11:55:33

lucke
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From: Poland
Registered: 2004-11-30
Posts: 4,018

Re: Frugalware & Arch

Speed is subjective. Just check it for yourself ;-)

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#6 2006-02-12 12:03:22

arooaroo
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From: London, UK
Registered: 2005-01-13
Posts: 1,268
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Re: Frugalware & Arch

The other difference is that Arch is more mature and has a larger community, lots of packages and lovely extras like the AUR.

Frugal is very interesting. I like their openess - you feel like you know exactly what the roadmap is going to be. They supply an offical pacman front-end. They're also releasing official ports for x64 too. It's quite ambitious for such a newcomer, but fair-play to them - I hope they succeed.

The lead dev from Frugal has a vested interest in pacman and so he's been extremely forthcoming with suggestions (and I believe, actual code) for libalpm and pacman3, this is a good thing to see - Frugal contributing back to Arch. The advantage though is that Arch has a close rival that it needs to keep on top of - a bit of competition never hurt any one smile

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#7 2006-02-12 16:47:59

Riklaunim
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Registered: 2005-04-09
Posts: 106
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Re: Frugalware & Arch

frugalware seems to have few more packages (like Polish language packages for OpenOffice, alien) but the configuration is far from nice and arch'ish

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#8 2006-02-12 18:51:03

Dusty
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From: Medicine Hat, Alberta, Canada
Registered: 2004-01-18
Posts: 5,986
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Re: Frugalware & Arch

arooaroo wrote:

The advantage though is that Arch has a close rival that it needs to keep on top of - a bit of competition never hurt any one smile

WTF? We don't have any rivals or competition. Judd and the crew just do their thing, and if people like it, they use it. They aren't likely to say "Oh, X distro does this, we have to do it too to compete". They might say "Oh, X distro does this, what a neat idea", or "X distro does this, but it doesn't suit us, we'll stick with our way".

If we were competing, there'd be a graphical installer and other useless stuff by now. I like the Arch pilosophy... very Taoist.

Dusty

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#9 2006-02-12 19:03:02

arooaroo
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From: London, UK
Registered: 2005-01-13
Posts: 1,268
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Re: Frugalware & Arch

Dusty wrote:

They might say "Oh, X distro does this, what a neat idea", or "X distro does this, but it doesn't suit us, we'll stick with our way".

Er, that's still part of whole competition thing. I never said it was agressive.

If we were competing, there'd be a graphical installer and other useless stuff by now. I like the Arch pilosophy... very Taoist.

You could argue that Arch is competing with the non-bells-whistles distros.

You not taking your anti-jump-down-people's-throat pills today, Dusty? "WTF?"

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#10 2006-02-12 19:13:47

Gullible Jones
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Registered: 2004-12-29
Posts: 4,863

Re: Frugalware & Arch

Actually, right about now there seems to be a lot of joint development between Arch and Frugalware, e.g. with Pacman development.

(Personally, I'm kind of hoping for a merger (Archware?), since official support for x86-64 would be a big plus here. Probably not going to happen though.)

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#11 2006-02-12 19:22:02

arooaroo
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From: London, UK
Registered: 2005-01-13
Posts: 1,268
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Re: Frugalware & Arch

Gullible Jones wrote:

Actually, right about now there seems to be a lot of joint development between Arch and Frugalware, e.g. with Pacman development.

Yeah, I think this is a good thing. Although Frugal does seem to be taking pacman/ABS to different places. Their PKGBUILDs have different fields (I seem to recall). The pacman.conf also has a slightly different format for repo locations.

Gullible Jones wrote:

(Personally, I'm kind of hoping for a merger (Archware?), since official support for x86-64 would be a big plus here. Probably not going to happen though.)

I don't think it ought to happen. Frugal's similarly is purely its choice of package management software. Arch wouldn't need to merge since Judd gave a strong indication in his interview the other day that Arch would officially support the x86-64 port in the near future.

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#12 2006-02-12 19:48:31

Neuro
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From: Poland
Registered: 2005-10-12
Posts: 352

Re: Frugalware & Arch

arooaroo wrote:

Arch wouldn't need to merge since Judd gave a strong indication in his interview the other day that Arch would officially support the x86-64 port in the near future.

Could you say something more about this? Perhaps post a link to a mailing list entry/post?

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#13 2006-02-12 19:51:32

Dusty
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From: Medicine Hat, Alberta, Canada
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Re: Frugalware & Arch

It would make more sense to join frugal and slack than arch and frugal.

roll

</throat-jump>

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#14 2006-02-12 19:52:29

Dusty
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From: Medicine Hat, Alberta, Canada
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Posts: 5,986
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Re: Frugalware & Arch

Neuro wrote:

Could you say something more about this? Perhaps post a link to a mailing list entry/post?

Search forum for 'Judd interview' should work.

Dusty

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#15 2006-02-13 23:30:49

ihavenoname
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Registered: 2006-01-09
Posts: 198

Re: Frugalware & Arch

Well i tried Frugalware ...and I must say very impressive....the configs are not all in basically one file (rc.conf) but they are in one folder and i must say setting up my wireless card to auto start was very simple and well organized...the two install cds are wonderful as they have almost every program you would need (and  you get to choose what to keep.) best of all it came with full multimeda support (even DVD). Xorg 7 and There was a gorgeous splash screen as well. however it lacks that feel that exsists with Arch that you set up your own system etc. And most of the stuff that I have named above is very achievable with Arch. So im not sure which way im gonna go...Arch or Frugalware.....lol


In this land of the pain the sane lose not knowing they were part of the game.

~LP

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#16 2006-02-14 19:58:23

budman7
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Registered: 2006-01-19
Posts: 10

Re: Frugalware & Arch

You could have a frugal system with frugalware.
Just do as Arch does and just install the base system and then use pacman to install everything else you want.
Installing everything from the 2 cd's will give you a great deal of software that is useless to you.

I haven' tried the base install yet, so I don't know what it is like.


Into the great wide open without a clue
Registered Linux user 375921
www.google.com/linux is your friend to find stuff.

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#17 2006-02-17 06:10:48

hypermegachi
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Registered: 2004-07-25
Posts: 311

Re: Frugalware & Arch

alrighty...ubuntu's dapper crapped out on me when i tried a apt-get update (man debian's bleeding edge is sooooo unstable...every time i do anything it breaks the system)

anyways, this was a good opportunity to finally try out this infamous frugalware.  slackware was my love affair before i stumbled upon arch, so it was interesting to see how this slackware-based distro would be like.

anyways, installer was text based using cfdisk, so nothing new there.  it's similar to the one from slackware.  nothing good/bad about it.

the kernel doesn't use initrd.  it has a bootsplash which looks pretty sweetass.

it uses sysv instead of bsd....or at least a modified version of sysv.  normally, rc1.d, rc2.d etc are contained in /etc.  in frugal, everything is contained in rc.d

so here's the structure...

/etc
/etc/rc.d
/etc/rc.d/rc0.d
/etc/rc.d/rc0.d/S00something
/etc/rc.d/rc0.d/K00something
/etc/rc.d/rc.theactualdaemon

everything's contained within rc.d, so it doesn't clutter /etc so much.  anywho, you can you the "service" program or chkconfig to start/stop services.  they also ship with a nice little gui program to edit it.

they have ABS, only it's renamed to the Frugalware Source Tree.  the structure is slightly different, but basically you go into /var/fst/ and you makepkg everything.

they also provide a program called repoman which automatically uses FST to fetch the sources and compile/install it for you.  i dunno if this re-uses any changes (i.e. kernel changes in config).

they have a much smaller community, so i was surprised that they didn't have cpufreqd in their repositories.  anywho, i suppose it's easy enough to mock up a PKGBUILD (which is a FrugalBuild for them), but their init system is slightly different, so i can't just use the one from arch.

anywho, their version of pacman is spiced up with a lot of macros for the FrugalBuilds.  they shorten up a lot of things...i'm not sure of the details, but they have things like Fmake and Fmakedepends in the FrugalBuilds.  basically it just saves you from typing the entire command.

uh....what else....it's fuggin fast!  i was stunned to see that it was actually faster than arch.  it's subjective of course...i don't really know that it IS faster.  but it does one thing noticeably faster, which is the gnome menus.  on arch it takes a while for the icons to load, that it is noticable.  on frugal it is lightning quick.

at first i thought maybe it was because frugal was using 100% of my cpu (didn't get scaling working at first), but a reboot to arch and forcing 100% proved that it wasn't that.  maybe linux has some kinda thing like windows where you reinstall every 6 months to get a snappy install again...

anyways, hope that was helpful.
the biggest advantage arch has over frugal right now is repository size and AUR.

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#18 2006-02-17 07:42:27

ihavenoname
Member
Registered: 2006-01-09
Posts: 198

Re: Frugalware & Arch

I definatly agree Frugalware is lacking in packages. ...it maybe becuase they are tied up makeing a 64bit version as well... i dunno. Yes in someways Frugalware does seem faster then Arch....but its not always that way kde seems faster in arch. also arch is much more developed where as Frugalware is lacking in some areas. The frugalware community seems staggeringly small....i got no help on the forums....the IRC channel was okay. Im dual booting frugalware and arch for now but in the end im sure ill probably just stick to arch. Its much more configureable in terms of i choose whats on my comp. besides most of the stuff that Frug. installed that i used i have on my custom repo cd for arch. One big problem with Frugalware is that Cedega doesnt seem to run on it....other things as well but primarly Cedega...this was dishearting for me...

another ridiculus thing about Frug. is that they include programs such as alien that really have no use to any Frugalware users what so ever....

to be honest most of the Frugalware problems lie in the size of their community....arch is bigger which lends to more help and more contributions that allow for advancment...it makes a huge diffrence...I know that now. on their boards A post like this may have never been answered.


In this land of the pain the sane lose not knowing they were part of the game.

~LP

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#19 2006-02-17 09:44:01

Mr Green
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From: U.K.
Registered: 2003-12-21
Posts: 5,893
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Re: Frugalware & Arch

I think the problem lies they (frugal!) do not like to be compared to Arch ..

Frugalware is more like slack with pacman added

As for packages well they would argue that if a package is missing request it or build it yourself much (same as Arch)

I have used Frugalware64 just to test out my 64 system

But I love Arch as its simple to configure,update & maintain

Its the old the thread Arch vs Gentoo, they are very different but its personal choice ;-)


Mr Green

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#20 2006-02-17 13:51:22

hypermegachi
Member
Registered: 2004-07-25
Posts: 311

Re: Frugalware & Arch

yeh...i know what you mean about community size.  i had a problem...and here was the thread i posted.
http://forums.frugalware.org/index.php? … e29f6979aa

basically, i solved it on my own, but it woulda been nice to get at least one response.  anyways, i got one problem left, and it's that my fan doesn't slow down.  the processor is clocked at the lowest, but the fan is still spinning high speed.  looks like i'll have to go to linuxquestions.org to find an answer.  (btw, this works outta the box in arch)

dunno why, but i actually prefer frugal's init system right now.  i think it would be nice to be able to change which daemons start/stop without having to go through rc.conf....perhaps in future initscripts it might be worth while to have the daemons in a seperate file with a mini script front-end

edit: back to topic, frugalware should be compared with rubix.  both are based on slackware but use pacman.

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#21 2006-02-18 16:30:11

mezoko
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Registered: 2005-03-26
Posts: 310
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Re: Frugalware & Arch

Gullible Jones wrote:

Actually, right about now there seems to be a lot of joint development between Arch and Frugalware, e.g. with Pacman development.

(Personally, I'm kind of hoping for a merger (Archware?), since official support for x86-64 would be a big plus here. Probably not going to happen though.)

Once judd get some time and a x86_64bit machine I bet that there will be a merge of what Judd wants and the current unoffical 64bit arch. I've been using it and it been great except teh few packages that aren't working for 64bit but that for all distros. Yeah arch64 is still in it baby days but it will mature the more people we get working on it the better. Hopefully an installer will really make people want to try it out.


"The only thing we have to fear is fear itself." - Franklin D. Roosevelt

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#22 2006-02-26 11:54:22

ady
Member
Registered: 2006-02-11
Posts: 22

Re: Frugalware & Arch

If i were to overwrite the frugal pacman with the one from arch would it use arch packages and repos? Or maeby install it in a diferent location so ia hve pacman for frugal packages and that pacman for arch packages. In this case the config files would probably  conflict since there are subtle difrences between the config files.

They should have kept package compatibility with arch. Duno why hey had to go and change it to .fpm
They have xgl in official repo if anyone is interested(shouldn't be too hard to get the files from the .fpm in an arch box). I got it to work and it's great.

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#23 2006-05-26 00:27:28

hypermegachi
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Registered: 2004-07-25
Posts: 311

Re: Frugalware & Arch

ady wrote:

They should have kept package compatibility with arch. Duno why hey had to go and change it to .fpm

frugal is based on slackware.  arch is based on crux.  keeping package compatibility is like telling fedora and suse to have rpm compatability.

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#24 2006-05-26 00:47:27

test1000
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Registered: 2005-04-03
Posts: 834

Re: Frugalware & Arch

i don't really see the great difference actually. The only real difference i can think of now(02:45 though..) is the init system; which might be fixable by some clever script that's run after you installed an arch package that tries to install a new init script or something.

I think it could be done and should have been done, but alas...


KISS = "It can scarcely be denied that the supreme goal of all theory is to make the irreducible basic elements as simple and as few as possible without having to surrender the adequate representation of a single datum of experience." - Albert Einstein

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#25 2006-05-26 05:01:23

hypermegachi
Member
Registered: 2004-07-25
Posts: 311

Re: Frugalware & Arch

test1000 wrote:

i don't really see the great difference actually.

you should read about how arch uses the /opt directory vs other distros.

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