The Frugalware Developer Team announced yesterday, March 22nd, the release of Frugalware 1.0 Linux distribution, the tenth stable version in its history. "The version number 1.0 does not indicate anything really special, the new release will bring you as many new features and bugfixes as usual, but it's still a milestone in the development of the last five years." was stated in the official release announcement.

The features included in the final release are the same as those in 1.0 RC2, but changes were made to address several minor bugs.

Highlights of Frugalware 1.0

· Support for the EXT4 filesystem;
· Support for ASUS Eee PC;
· A new "ppc" port;
· 32-bit chroot can be used on x86_64 architectures;
· Support for a separate /boot partition on a RAID1 device;
· gService, a program that allows users to control running services;
· Java plugin on x86_64 architectures.

About Frugalware

The short description for it is that it's a Linux distribution suited for intermediate users who are somewhat accustomed to the terminal. It wasn't developed to meet particular needs, being more of a general-purpose OS.

Frugalware is primarily about multimedia, design and simplicity, meaning it does its best to be as easy to handle as possible, while providing the means for a great user experience.

For package handling, Frugalware uses the versatile pacman package manager, a tar.bz2 based tool, very similar to Slackware's .tgz. However, pacman handles .fpm packages (to separate them from the usual tarballs) and is written in C, giving it extra speed. This applications also handles the task of package updating, as Frugalware doesn't have a standalone tool for this job.

Download Frugalware Linux 1.0 right now from Softpedia.