TechieMoe.com

Introduction:

After my less than stellar rant on Arch Linux, I received much feedback. It was almost as much as some of my Slackware rants. One fellow suggested I look at something called the CHAKRA Project.

Chakra is sort of a jumbled acronym for "Arch and KDE." Its stated goals include making a distribution that is easier to install than Arch, but still based on it. Sounds good so far.

This is an alpha, so most of the bugs I mention will probably (I hope) be fixed by the time it hits a full release. I won't be offering a score on this one because honestly it's just not far enough along to judge fairly. It is however interesting enough to merit writing about.

Install:

The boot screen asked my language and then whether or not I wanted nonfree drivers (I did). The LiveCD desktop is vintage KDE 4, complete with that ridiculous and unkillable "cashew" in the top right corner.

I was intrigued by this file called "Passwords.txt," so I double-clicked on it. I was given a dialog asking what kind of text encoding I wanted to use (which was odd since it's just a basic text file from what I can tell) and when I hit OK I was shown a lovely error message that told me KWord couldn't open a text file. Really? What *can* KWord do for me if it can't handle text? Do my taxes?

I'm not sure what a "creation error" is, nor who I might call in the event of one. A Creationist, perhaps? Or God himself? He is supposed to be responsible for all creation, right? At any rate, inability to open a text file didn't exactly give me a lot of hope for Chakra, but I soldiered on.

The installer is the most attractive I've seen this side of openSuSE 11. The warning about my hamster gave me a chuckle. I went through some license acceptance screens for TrueType fonts and Adobe (probably Flash).

I clicked "show all" to get English (US) as my KDE language on this screen. For some strange reason, although I could get a US keyboard layout, the only available English option for KDE-Language was British English. Brilliant.

I then set up the host name and mirror settings, and was asked about a ramdisk. I fell under the category of "if you are unsure what this means" and clicked Next. I took the default partition scheme and filesystem setup.

The install started chugging along until the hamster fell off the wheel, so to speak. Much to my amusement, the screenshot slide show in the background kept going. I closed the installer and got a second error message (expanded for detail).

Not really sure what to do now since I couldn't install, I just played with some stuff on the LiveCD. Open With-> Kate worked on the Passwords.txt file. The "Licenses" folder contained licenses (shock!) for things like the GPL, Intel Wifi drivers, TrueType fonts, Flash, and the Java runtime environment.

Software Selection:

KOffice, AmaroK, and the usual KDE suspects are installed. No games are included, which is typical of a boilerplate KDE 4 system. Firefox was nowhere to be found, and Kopete replaced Pidgin for IM. Of the applications I could see, nothing really deviated from the default KDE 4 collection.

Conclusion:

Chakra is every bit an alpha. These are exactly the kinds of things you expect. Despite this I'm excited at the idea of Chakra and I hope after some rigorous bug trials (and a couple of betas) they can solidify what I see as a solid foundation. Look for a rant from me as soon as this project hits a Release Candidate or full-on final version.