TechieMoe.com

Introduction:

I would like to thank reader budman7 from LinuxForums for providing me with the install CDs that made this review possible. I wish I could say his contribution brought to my attention a wonderful gem of a distro that I will rave about for the rest of my days. Yeah... that's not going to happen. Rant perhaps, but not rave.

Install:

The installer is ncurses-based. It's not the most easily-navigated installer I've used. There are certain points (for instance during partitioning) where it's unclear what the user's next step should be. It relies on the user to partition the harddrive manually, so that pulls this out of the realm of the new Linux users.

Once the partitioning was done, it asked me to choose sets of software packages and dumped me to a console window where the package manager listed all the things it wanted to install. If you're familiar with Gentoo's Portage or Debian's Apt-get, you know what to expect.

Halfway through the install I was given an "errors occurred" message and an option to "ignore" or "exit installer". Since this happened the last time I tried to install this distro, I'm pretty sure this was due to an issue with the actual OS rather than a bad burn. I decided to continue in spite of the errors.

Every package after the first errored out as well, though I continued to press on, hoping that at the very least I could get *something* installed. Prospects were not looking good. The installer then asked for disc 2. I could only hope it had less errors. My hope was misplaced. At this point I knew I was not going to get a functional OS out of the deal, but I wanted to see just what I *did* end up with nonetheless. Alas, by the 12th "error" message the installer froze, forcing me to hard reboot and give up.

On a whim I decided (since I'd had issues with SATA and Nexenta) to try installing on my IDE harddrive. Lo and behold, the installer didn't error out on the first disc, but it did show quite a few package errors on the second. The main difference was that on my IDE drive the install actually *finished*. There really should be some sort of warning on the website about this. WARNING: Distro will probably suck on SATA. Just FYI. Also, before anyone emails me, I did a thorough diagnostic of both my IDE and SATA harddrives in the middle of this, and they're both in perfect health.

Upon reboot I was FINALLY greeted with a GRUB prompt and logged into a KDE 3.5 desktop. Apparently all those dozens of packages it was trying to install but errored out weren't *that* important after all. I decided to start up my usual regimen. When I popped in my DVD of testing stuff, a window popped up similar to MS Windows' "Autorun" menu, asking me whether I'd like to open the DVD in a new window or do some other action, and whether I'd like to make this the default action. I'm not sure if this is something peculiar to Frugalware or peculiar to KDE 3.5, since this is my first time using both.

MP3 playback is installed by default. MPG video and *some* WMV codecs are installed as well. I didn't have any WMV9 files to test at the time. My USB thumb drive was also detected and popped up with one of those autorun windows as well. While I was browsing my USB drive, the desktop froze. I assume it's because Frugalware used the open-source "nv" driver rather than VESA for my video card, which has been known to give it issues. I rebooted and checked the /etc/X11/xorg.conf to make sure. Yep. Swapping it to VESA cleared it up. Mounting and unmounting my USB drive worked fine as a regular user. The latest Nvidia drivers installed and worked without incident.

Software Selection:

The usual KDE suspects. Gnome was installed with all its usual applications as well. Notably absent were Firefox, Gaim, and OpenOffice. The version of SANE they use did not detect my scanner, though I can't say I'm exactly surprised. One of the crown jewels for this distro with some people is the "pacman" package manager, which to me just looks like a rip-off of Apt or Portage, and is equally useless since I don't have an internet connection.

Most Annoying Feature:

It doesn't work with Serial ATA harddrives. I thought that in order to even be called a decent distribution these days you had to at least *support* Serial ATA, but apparently I was mistaken. The constant package integrity errors I got during the install didn't make me like this distro any better either. It was like going on a blind date with someone you immediately dislike, and having her step on your shoe from time to time just for grins.

Who's it best for?

It's nothing special but it did install and detect most of my hardware, and although I got catastrophic errors on the SATA harddrive and had to hobble through the install on my IDE drive, it did eventually finish and give me a usable desktop, unlike some distros I've used recently (*cough* Gentoo *cough cough* Vector). You could do worse than Frugalware, but you could most certainly do better as well.