News

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.

The Frugalware Developer Team is pleased to announce the immediate availability of Frugalware 2.0, our twentieth stable release.

No new features have been added since 2.0rc2. If you didn’t follow the changes during the rc releases, here are the most important changes since 1.9 in no particular order:

• Package updates:
  • Linux kernel 3.14.19
  • Xorg server 1.15.2
  • KDE 4.14.3
  • GNOME 3.12.2
  • Xfce 4.10.1
  • LXDE 0.99.0
  • LibreOffice 4.3.3.2
  • Mozilla Firefox 35.0.1
  • Chromium browser 39.0.2171.96
• New features:
  • MATE 1.8.1

Please refer to the Frugalware Rigel ChangeLog for more information.

The Frugalware Developer Team is pleased to announce the immediate availability of Frugalware 2.0rc2, the second candidate of the upcoming 2.0 stable release. Here are some of the major improvements, fixes and updates since 2.0rc1:

• Package updates:
  • LXDE 0.99.0
  • KDE 4.14.3
• New features:
  • none

Download for i686 and x86_64: See our mirror list. Don’t forget to check the integrity of the install images before burning!

This is the first release candidate for Frugalware 2.0.

This release contains many package updates and security fixes.

Updated packages: Linux kernel 3.14.19, XOrg server 1.15.2, GNOME 3.12.2, KDE 4.14.2, LibreOffice 4.3.3.2, Mozilla Firefox 33.1 to name a few major components.

Download for x86_64: See our mirror list. Don’t forget to check the integrity of the install images before burning!

pyFPM is the legitimate successor of gFPM, with a new interface, a dedicated daemon for it and more ergnomics. It’s written in Python and uses GTK+2 and DBus to run.

Version 1.2.3 has been released a few days ago et is now considered as “stable”. You can test it without any issues (or only a very little). Packages are not yet available on Frugalware’s tree, but you can download them here.

The Frugalware Developer Team is pleased to announce the immediate availability of Frugalware 1.9, our nineteenth stable release.

No new features have been added since 1.9rc2. If you didn’t follow the changes during the pre/rc releases, here are the most important changes since 1.8 in no particular order:

• Updated packages: Linux kernel 3.10.17, XOrg server 1.14.2, GNOME 3.8, KDE 4.11, LibreOffice 4.1.2.3, Mozilla Firefox 22.0 to name a few major components.
• netconfig has been replaced by NetworkManager
• frugalwareutils has been replaced by the new fvbeutils
• vi binary symlinks are now configurable, used to be hardcoded to their packages
• old display-manager-legacy.service has been dropped for the new systemd method of individual service files
• console keymaps and x11 keymaps are now managed by the systemd method

Additionally, this marks the first stable release using the new installer that has been in development for a year already. It was redesigned from the bottom up to be more resistant to user errors and to be more stable. It should be stable enough by now for general use. However, at least one major feature of the old installer is absent from the new one. Network install images will not be generated for this release as this feature has not been reimplemented yet. At present, only 2 image types are available. Basic, which contains only packages from base group. Full, which contains all the packages from the main package groups only. From now on, images will not contain packages from any of the -extra package groups. They will only be available via download after the installation is complete. One final note about the x86_64 images. They support experimental booting on EFI systems, but they have no support for installing EFI bootloaders. If you wish to install to EFI, you will have to skip GRUB2 installation and install your own EFI bootloader instead.