Adventures In Open Source

KDE 4.2 Desktop

Today I’d like to take a quick look at a distribution still in the early stages of development, but one that, in my opinion holds massive potential. That distribution is Chakra Project and it’s based on Arch Linux, which I reviewed not too long ago. According to their own website the idea was formed one night, in a dark corner of the Freenode IRC network where KDEmod developers linger. The idea to try and create a liveCD to display the virtues of Arch and KDEmod is a noble one. I tried out alpha 2 this week to see how they were getting on…

Vital Stats:
Distro base – Arch Linux
Packaging – .pkg.tar.gz (Managed by Pacman)
Linux Kernel – 2.6.29
Default Desktop – KDE 4.2

Introduction:
This won’t be my typical in-depth review because Chakra is only in alpha, and I think it’s a bit unfair to hold it up against other finished distros just yet. Like any software in the early stages of development it has it’s bugs, I’ll talk about them of course but I’d rather focus on the features and potential. It’s more of a distro preview than a review of the finished product I suppose. With that in mind, lets get into it. Read the rest of this entry »

Arch logo

After many broken promises and much procrastination, I finally made it onto Arch Linux and that’s where I’ve been for the past couple of weeks now. I had a failed attempt at Arch last year when my hard drive died; not Arch’s fault in any way, but since then I haven’t really had a chance to get back to it. It’s a distro a lot of people tell me about. The Arch fans are always really passionate and enthusiastic in describing it to me; so I figured it was high time I found out for myself what all this fuss was about…

Vital Stats:
*Remember Arch is a rolling release so these just the versions I had at the time*
Distro base – None. It’s a custom distro
Packaging – .pkg.tar.gz (Managed by Pacman)
Linux Kernel – 2.6.28-ARCH
Default Desktop – Doesn’t exactly have one. I installed Gnome 2.26 Read the rest of this entry »