Saving...Introduction
Chakra Linux was originally created as a LiveCD to try and install Arch with KDEmod. Since its creation, it has evolved to become its own unique distribution. In the words of the Chakra developers- “Chakra is a free, user-friendly and extremely powerful liveCD and/or distribution based on the award winning KDE Software Compilation. Chakra is by default a GTk free distribution specially made for run Qt based applications and frameworks at full performance.” Just a quick heads up to anyone who extensively uses GTK apps, CHAKRA DOES NOT INCLUDE ANY GTK APPS IN THE REPOS, if you do not like KDE do not bother with Chakra. If you like KDE, but need one or two popular GTK apps; like Firefox, Chrome, OpenOffice, or GIMP, the Chakra developers designed a bundlesystem to package these apps in standalone bundles that don’t install libraries. Most of the testing from here on will be in VirtualBox, since my laptop has trouble with even some of the best known distros, like Ubuntu.
(If anyone complains that pre2 isn’t the official stable, I’m using pre2 since it’s just stable with bugfixes)
On the next page- LiveCD and Installation
LiveCD and Installation
The LiveCD was normal is all respects save for one, it had an option on boot to use either free or nonfree drivers. The nonfree boot will enable any drivers, like Catalyst, that can improve the user’s system. Since I was on a VM I just used free drivers, I’ll try the nonfree when I do the hardware test on my laptop.
Chakra lets you choose your drivers from the liveCD
The installer looked extremely nice, one of the best I’ve seen. So far Chakra was one of the best installers I’ve used.
Chakra has a very polished installer
The user creation was one installation aspect Chakra excels in, it’s easy to set up multiple users, and configure them. You can even set your avatar from within the installer.
Chakra's user creation process is easy to use, and powerful
The installation got much less user friendly in partitioning. As far as I can tell (and if there is one it’s well hidden), Chakra has no automatic partitioning, users must set partitions up manually.
Chakra's partition manager requires users to manually set up partitions
The install itself took my under ten minutes, and a nice slideshow played in the background. There was an option to install additional software after the installation finished, but I kind of forgot to save the screenshot.
The Chakra installation features a nice slideshow
Turn to the next page to see the Chakra desktop
Chakra’s Desktop
Chakra is basically standard KDE as far as the desktop is concerned. There isn’t much in terms of application, but Chakra has everything most users need. There was some customization done to the desktop, there was a nice wallpaper, a custom Plasma theme, and the kickoff menu featured a Chakra category with links to documentation and community resources for Chakra.
Chakra makes it easy for new users to find documentation
Chakra didn’t install with flash, but it was easy to add and worked well once installed.
Flash in Chakra
Next up is package management
Package Management
Chakra uses the CInstall frontend to the pacman package manager, but there are plans to replace CInstall with something else in the future. CInstall is just a standard package management application with nothing special.
CInstall is just a basic package manager
Now for the interesting part of Package Management in Chakra, the bundles system. To use a GTK application in Chakra, you download the bundle from their website, and then open the bundle in CInstall. It sets up the application so that it can virtually install all required dependencies in an iso like filesystem, so that no GTK files are installed system wide. I decided to install Chromium to try it out. The installation was smooth and worked quite well.
The bundles system installer
The problem came when I ran Chromium. Although Chromium WOULD run, and run well for that matter, it required the root password on each startup.
GTK apps like Chromium are kind of a pain to use
My conclusions are on the next page
Conclusions
Chakra is a powerful, well made distro as long as you are a KDE user. People dependent on GTK applications are left behind until the bundles system improves. Chakra is also not suited for extremely new Linux users as it requires you to know how to partition your drives properly.
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