The installer started by offering a choice of installer, installer (vga fb), and installer (gui). I chose the last, which eventually crashed, so I re-started with the second (I’m not sure what the first does). A beginner with no knowledge of partitioning would have trouble with the installer, but Frugalware does describe itself as being for ‘intermediate users’. It offers a choice of software packages, but doesn’t detail their contents. There are five desktops on offer: Xfce, KDE, Gnome, LXDE, and E17; I chose Xfce.

When I rebooted, I found a standard Xfce desktop. There’s not a lot of software listed for a 4.1GB disk (evidently those 5 desktops take up a lot of space) — LibreOffice, Firefox, Thunderbird, Pidgin, Xchat, VLC, and Gimp — but they all worked perfectly, with no warnings when launched from the CLI. Media codecs are installed, and all my test files worked, even the buggy ‘mp4 from hell’. Later I discovered that the menu didn’t include all my software: as before Fontforge was installed but not listed.

When I tried to configure the panel, I found things coming back after being removed and there was even a panel crash. When I tried to run the gui package tool, it was missing a dependency. After I’d installed that from the CLI, I used it to install Gnucash. That was missing a dependency. Fontforge actually ran in this version, until it crashed with a segmentation fault. Frugalware is still not stable enough to recommend.

I've been using this distro for about a week now, and it is very nice. I have been so impressed, i've made Frugalware my main distro. The pacakage manager is pacman-g2. I have never used pacman at all, but am very impressed. It will automatically solve dependencies but will ignore them if requested. I appreciate this flexibility, which can't be achieved with apt/dpkg, which i used previously. I don't have many bad words to say about Frugalware. The installer has a few options and i chose the text mode, and it was buggy. It froze the first time and the second worked, but there is glitches that cause text to overlap selection boxes. Over all, a great distro and i'm suprised it doesn't have a larger user base.