Cucumber packages are just tarballs of the package, much like Slackware & Arch Linux packages. Cucumber Linux actually uses Slackware's Pkgtools for package management. More information about package management can be found at the package management page.

To aid in package selection, maintenance and management, Cucumber Linux groups similar packages together into package groups. For example, packages that are all related to development (i.e. GCC, binutils, make, and so on) are all placed in the same package group. This allows a user to install only the package groups he actually needs (for example, you may want to skip the x-base package group if you are installing on a server).

The package groups in Cucumber Linux are based off the Slackware package groups. Each package group listed here (for the most part) has a corresponding Slackware package group noted in parentheses.

This similarity is only existent to a point though. Many cucumber package groups are further broken down into up to four sub groups: base, general, extra and testing, as denoted by the suffix. Packages that are absolutely essential to providing the basic functionality of a package group are put in the base group. Packages that are generally expected to be available, but are not essential are put in the general group. Packages that provide extra functionality are placed in the extra group. Packages that still being tested and may not be completely secure or stable yet are placed in the testing group.