Are you interested in a Frugalware review?

Hey Kaddy.
Today the Frugalware team released their new 1.7 Final version. It`s based on Slackware with the pacman packetmanager from Archlinux. And you can choose your packages during the Installprocess.

My first Impressions:
The Installer has some graphical glitches and it sucks with a bluetooth keyboard. I have to use a USB-keyboard. Otherwise it skipped a few steps and I couldn`t finish the installer without an error. T like the AIF-installer from Arch a little bit more, cause the Frugalware-setup in expert mode is too time-consuming. You have to google a lot of packages if you want a minimal Install with only the packages you really need.
So i went for a basic setup where I choose base, devel, xorg gnome and libs

Yeah over 5 GB unpacked! That was alot better on Arch

But it looks kinda cool. We have Gnome 3.4.2 with the Frugalware-theme which looks like an Apple design. Kernel is 3.4fw5

But Bluetooth sucks here too. It lags like hell and I couldn` t set it up myself even if I install the gnome-bluetooth package through pacman. I have to fix this one. Otherwise this distro doesn`t make sense on my htpc with a usb-keyboard and usb-mouse

I`ve Arch on my Laptop, and tried Sabayon, Gentoo and Funtoo too. But I doesn`t like portage. It`s too time consuming. Even compiling with a 2500k which cflag -march=native takes some hours to install. Building Chromium takes 20 Min. I thought gentoo is an up-to-date distro. But their gnome version stays on 2.3 in the stable "repo" and 3.2 in testing. In comparision with fedora,frugalware and arch we have 3.4.2. Sabayon is too bloated in my opinion and I could`nt find a tutorial how to set up the spinbase version so I`ve got only a black screen. No bash at all.

Maybe you recognize me from youtube. Aka Darkside19861 I will reply later, if I could fix the bluetooth issues and review frugalware a bit deeper with pictures, apps and so on

Have a nice day
Christian

Edit: I think I will go back to Arch. Frugalware is too buggy on my HTPC. Even in the Audio-setup my digital Soundcard(Teufel 5.1 surround) is mixed up with my Analog-setup(Yamaha HS80M) and I could only adjust the Volume if I install alsa-utils and change the volume with alsa-mixer

Edit: Oh yeah I forgot to mention that if you`re watching a video and make a double klick to maximize/minimize the window it could happen that the movieplayer closes itself without an error message

It could be a good distro if they fix all these bugs, and make the installer a little bit more comfortable, but for now it`s not more like an early beta-build.