Frugalware is available on a set of CDs, of which 2 are required for a basic installation with X. The installer promised well, being fast and easy to use.

Unfortunately, at the first boot I was unable to log in as the keyboard was dead. This was eventually traced to the installer having given the wrong name for the UK keyboard. In such circumstances there should be an error message and the system should use a default configuration, but neither occurred.

I had selected Gnome and Xfce as the desktops, but instead I got Gnome and Blackbox.

The boot routine often fails to initialise eth0, and I failed to do so manually.

Media codecs were installed by default, but Totem failed on some formats and GMplayer was too broken to use.

Surprisingly, many things usually found on a single CD were missing: the Gnome help system, some common GNU utilities, and all office software; presumably they were crowded out by the inclusion of so many desktop environments.

One good thing was the pacman package management system and its GUI front end, gfpm.

The developers would do better to offer fewer options, to give more consideration to what is essential (help and a word processor), and to do more testing.