The Frugalware Newsletter is a new fortnightly (Hopefully… ;-)) newsletter which aims to keep users up to date about what’s been going on in Frugalware development.

The first issue can be found here. We hope you like it!

The Frugalware Developer Team is pleased to announce the immediate availability of Frugalware 0.6rc2, the second release candidate of the upcoming 0.6 stable release.

A short and incomplete list of changes since 0.6rc1:

• Improvements:
  • Updated the documentation: obsolete parts are removed, new parts are written, it is more than two times longer than it was till now.
  • Finished the artwork update, it is now homogenous again.
  • Updated the translations of the installer
• Package updates:
  • GCC 4.1.2 with changes to correct regressions from previous releases
  • GNOME 2.18.0 RC1 with cool features, important bug fixes, great translations
  • More than 30 new packages: asciidoc, bzflag, rtl8110, new beryl plugins and much more!

WARNING: It has been discovered that the GConf version included in 0.6rc2 is broken and therefore GNOME will not work on a default install. To get around this, you should not install the gnome group when installing, and install it from frugalware-current afterwards, making sure that the gconf version to install is 2.18.0.1. Sorry for the inconvenience

The Frugalware Developer Team is pleased to announce the immediate availability of Frugalware 0.6rc1, the first release candidate of the upcoming 0.6 stable release.

A short and incomplete list of changes since 0.6pre2:

• Improvements:
  • Brand new GDM theme, which has many improvements over previous themes.
  • Many packages recompiled to take advantage of new features in Glibc 2.5 and GCC 4.1.
• Package updates:
  • GNOME 2.17.90 with several bug fixes and speed enhancements
  • XFCE 4.4 with many new features and numerous bug fixes
  • Beryl 0.1.99.2 with many usablity, speed and reliability improvements
  • Added a package for VirtualBox, a free opensource virtualization program
  • Kernel 2.6.20 with KVM virtualization support and many speed enhancements
  • KDE 3.5.6
  • Wine 0.9.29 bringing stability improvements
  • 45 new packages: mythtv, kvm, xfburn, cdrkit and much more!

Please refer to the Frugalware Testing ChangeLog for more information.

The Frugalware Developer Team is pleased to announce the immediate availability of Frugalware 0.6pre2, the second technical preview release of the upcoming 0.6 stable release.

A short and incomplete list of changes since 0.6pre1:

• New features in the installer:
  • Much improved error handling. A dialog box will be displayed in the unlikely event of a segmentation fault and the installer will exit, instead of just restarting from the beginning.
  • Use library calls to download the package database, which gives better error handling. If the database update fails, you will be told about it, instead of being given an empty category list.
  • There is now an option to go back to a previous step in the installer (where it makes sense).
  • CD/DVD installation is now faster: integrity and conflict checks are done before creating the installation images.
  • There is floppy image available now for tftp installs.
• Improvements:
  • Added KDE support to fw-xgl-control and Beryl.
  • Gnome-mount, a replacement for pmount in GNOME resulting in more reliable and flexible automounting in GNOME.
• Updates:
  • Linux Kernel 2.6.19
  • Added virt-manager and gnome-applet-vm packages as GUI tools for Xen
  • GNOME 2.17.3, with new features and bug fixes
  • Xfce 4.4 Release Candidate 2, with a lot of bug fixes
  • Beryl 0.1.3 with lots of new eye-candy effects
  • dhcpcd 3.0, resulting in more reliable network autoconfiguration
  • Curl 7.16.0
  • DBUS 1.0 with several improvements and fixes
  • HAL 0.5.8.1 with new features and bug fixes

Please refer to the Frugalware Testing ChangeLog for more information.

Before upgrading to 8.2 version of postgresql, dump your databases. The new version is incompatible with the older one.

If you are using current and you have a GeForce 4 graphics card (this is a lot of laptops), please do not do a system upgrade until the nvidia-96xx package is available tomorrow. Once it is available, install it. The latest version of nvidia removes support for GeForce 4 cards.

As a side note, the Frugalware developer team would like to wish all our users a very Merry Christmas, and a Happy New Year!

The Frugalware Developer Team is pleased to announce the immediate availability of Frugalware 0.6pre1, the first technical preview release of the upcoming 0.6 stable release.

A short and incomplete list of changes since 0.5:

• New features:
  • All installed-by-default packages are now built using gcj/ecj, javac is only provided as an alternate compiler.
  • Installing from a USB stick is now supported.
  • Added PHP documentation for 23 languages.
• Updates:
  • Linux 2.6.18 with a much improved SATA layer and a few new drivers
  • GNU C Library 2.5 with support for the new ELF hash table format
  • Mozilla Firefox 2.0 with improved tabbed browsing and inline spell checking
  • Xfce 4.4rc1: This fixes all plugin crash problems with the old Xfce 4.2.x and the new version is much more stable.
  • KDE 3.5.5 with KHTML improvements, and support for sudo in kdesu
  • OpenOffice.org 2.0.4 with a latex export filter and encryption support in the pdf export filter
  • D-Bus 0.93 with many memleaks and bugs fixed
  • neon 0.26.1 with internationalization support
  • Xen 3.0.3 with HVM and XenFB support; Xen kernels upgraded to 2.6.18
  • db 4.5.20 with Multi-Version Concurrency Control (MVCC) support
  • Python 2.5 with an interesting mix of language and library improvements
  • GNOME 2.17.1 with various bugfixes and new features
  • Binutils 2.17.50.0.6 - this allows us to use the new ELF hash table format which is now enabled by default in our build system. This will cause a considerable performance increase in newly built packages.

Please refer to the Frugalware Testing ChangeLog for more information.

I’m one of the fussy web-designers. I create a design, a few months later I think it’s rubbish. So I created a new design :) Feel free to drop your comments to the Frugalware-devel list.

In other news, ftp5 should be back in sync. Have a good day! ;)

ftp5.frugalware.org is currently out of sync for -current users. Please temporarily switch to a different mirror in /etc/pacman.d/frugalware-current!

If you find any apps that don’t start with a message about libdbus-1.so.2 not found, we want to know about it now! Just submit a report with the package’s name to the Bug Tracker. Thanks!