To mitigate the known vulnerabilities Spectre v1-v3 we bumped gcc to version 7.3 and enabled some hardening compile flags als also bumped the whole toolchain glibc to version 2.27, binutils to version 2.30 and all major languages. Ffmpeg bumped to 3.4.x and the Linux kernel to version 4.15.4. That lead to a mass rebuild of all packages. While at it we did the long overdue switch from MySQL do MariaDB and from libjpeg to libjpeg-turbo. Please be patient while the merge is running, as you might break everything if you update in the middle.

As of today the kernel in frugalware-current is version 4.11. As it stands now the nvidia module is - again - using some GPL only functions so its impossible to provide a compiled package is it would be illegal. Until nvidia provides a fixed package upstream nvidia package with the patch is marked as nobuild.

After bumping the toolchain to gcc6 we had some trouble building some of the larger packages for i686. Since every dev is using x86_64 and the number of users still on i686 arch seems quite low, the decision to drop i686 completely was made. This raised the need to switch the lib32-extra packages - used mainly by steam and wine - that where build by stripping the i686 packages in the past, to a different buildsystem. crazy was so kind to establish a full multilib toolchain for that and some scheme (cross32.sh) so providing two flavors (x86_64 and lib32-extra) for one package. This work was merged yesterday and the two mentioned packages still work. If you find any issues feel free to raise some bug in the bugtracker.

In the last weeks after the release of Frugalware 2.1 crazy went forward and bumped gcc to version 6.2.1. In a concentrated effort all developers worked in the gcc6 WIP repo and rebuild many packages with the new toolchain. Yesterday we merged that WIP into current. If you do your usual “pacman-g2 -Syu” you will be prompted to upgrade pacman-g2 first. Then you will get an error about llvm. So before doing the pacman-g2 upgrade you have to remove llvm and readd it after:

The Frugalware Developer Team is pleased to announce the immediate availability of Frugalware 2.1, our twentyfirst stable release.

Important notice: Frugalware provided a -stable and -current tree in the past. As our team shrinked quite a bit lately we lack the manpower to continue providing a,

secure and stable tree while provding bleeding edge and latest package in another. Therefore we decided to move all users to the -current tree.

For users not wanting that we will provide a static, not updated snapshot of the -current tree each time we do a release.