thelinuxlink.net

I just did an install of Frugalware on my laptop, and I've gotta say, this is a real slick distribution. Wireless out of the box, Java, Flash, all the multimedia codecs you could want, out of the box, including Libdvdcss, and MP3. It has everything that makes Slackware great (stability, speed), plus the Pacman package manager from Arch Linux. Not only is Frugalware a breeze to install, but they actually have a 'stable' branch that gets updated every six months, unlike Arch Linux, where you have to continually update your system from a -current branch. I think this is a distro Slackers can really dig. Give it a shot, they even have a handy net install disc similar to Debian at only 20MB.

2.6.17 kernel
GNOME 2.16! Brand spankin' new release of GNOME
KDE 3.5.4
X.org 7.1
i686 Optimized

http://frugalware.org/

Wally Balljacker wrote:GNOME 2.16! Brand spankin' new release of GNOME

If you use Clearlooks with SUSE's Gilouche theming, plus the Tango icon set, this looks pretty damn nice, and even better when you add in XGL and Compiz.

Tsuroerusu wrote:

Wally Balljacker wrote:GNOME 2.16! Brand spankin' new release of GNOME

If you use Clearlooks with SUSE's Gilouche theming, plus the Tango icon set, this looks pretty damn nice, and even better when you add in XGL and Compiz.

It actually comes with Clearlooks + Tango icons by default. It also has a beautiful boot up splash screen, and GDM login manager. I'm really digging it. It's super fast, and it comes with a full multimedia suite out of the box. I was watching an H.264 video upon first boot up. This distro is definitely a keeper. I'll have to see about getting XGL up and running, they have a nice howto on their wiki.

Yeah, frugal was very nice last time I tried it, which was about a year ago. I'm thinking about giving it another run on the test box - IIRC, though, frugal was even more "bleeding edge" than arch. Has this changed any? I guess I can find out for myself, huh?

Huh. I can't get it to install - I've burned 2 sets of disks at this point, and according to k3b the md5 sums are fine. I've installed dozens of times on this box, so I doubt it's a problem with the box. I'll try again in the morning, but so far I'm not at all impressed.

Snarkout wrote:Huh. I can't get it to install - I've burned 2 sets of disks at this point, and according to k3b the md5 sums are fine. I've installed dozens of times on this box, so I doubt it's a problem with the box. I'll try again in the morning, but so far I'm not at all impressed.

What is the problem during installation? The installer is alittle akward compared to something like Ubuntu, or Debian, but I still think it's better than the Arch installer.

The problem is that it keeps crashing out with a "corrupted package" error at different points during the install. The installer itself is fine. And FWIW, by dozens of times in my prior post, I mean that I've installed dozens of distros/releases on this box. I've only tried 4 times with frugal so far. I discovered that you can stall the installer by hitting "scroll lock" - neat, huh? Or not, if you actually like getting things done - I'm wondering what the idea behind this was. Anyhow - I'll give it another shot tomorrow.

Snarkout wrote:The problem is that it keeps crashing out with a "corrupted package" error at different points during the install.

Sounds like a bad cdrom drive to me.

Linc wrote:

Snarkout wrote:The problem is that it keeps crashing out with a "corrupted package" error at different points during the install.

Sounds like a bad cdrom drive to me.

Or overheating chipset, or buggy PCI driver or... ?

Once had similar problems and eventually opened the box to find that the CPU cooler had been installed backwards (not by me). The install would get just so far, then die when the CPU overheated. Not likely in this case, though.

Linc wrote:

Snarkout wrote:The problem is that it keeps crashing out with a "corrupted package" error at different points during the install.

Sounds like a bad cdrom drive to me.

Well, my prior point was that I'd don many installs on this box, so unless something went bad within the last few weeks in a way that allowed for the dvd-rom drive to be used as a regular drive, I doubt it's the hardware. Maybe frugal doesn't like via chipsets. I'm going to try again in a few min here.

OK, there is no problem with the drive - I just installed ubuntu server followed by slack 10.2. I've also sha1ed the cds, and they're fine. I'll give the netboot disk a try. This is turning into a lot of work just to toss a distro on my test box.

Here I am, merrily downloading a gig of stuff from the repos. In retrospect, I wish I'd downloaded the -current netboot iso instead of the release one. I imagine I'll be re-downloading a lot of this stuff pretty soon here. If the install doesn't crap out for some reason or another, that is.

How do you choose a "base" install that you can then just build on top of? One thing I really don't like about the installer is the slack-like package chooser. "Expert" is way too much granularity for some things, and non-expert you have no flippin clue what is being installed.

Man these guys have about the same cds as debian !

I've had similar "bugs" when installing Slackware, Ubuntu, and PCLinuxOS. I've also had similar difficulties with Arch... so much so that an installation via the Net was the only way I could get it to complete properly.

Well, I'm finished. I simply cannot get frugalware installed on my testing box. This is way too much fuking work just to see if I think it's worth looking at as an alternative to arch. It could be an issue with my box, but like I've said, I've installed multiple other distros several times on this box w/o any trouble whatsoever. This is the first distro I cannot install. That more or less means I'll be giving it the thumbs down. I've got other things to do with my time.