Chakra GNU/Linux 2014.02



Chakra GNU/Linux is a Linux distribution I have enjoyed watching grow and develop over the years. Chakra rose from a Arch Linux foundation and took on two interesting characteristics. The first is that Chakra maintains a semi-rolling release style of package management. Basically the foundation of the distribution stays relatively static (and hopefully stable) while the end user applications roll forward, maintaining pace with the latest upstream versions. The second characteristic, and what makes Chakra stand out in my mind, is that the distribution tries to maintain a pure KDE/Qt environment. There are no GNOME/GTK+ packages in Chakra or even in the project's default software repositories. It is possible to add GTK-based software using an add-on repository and I will talk a bit about that later.



The latest release of Chakra GNU/Linux, version 2014.02, does not advertise many big changes, mostly the release announcement points to updated versions of software. Chakra ships with KDE 4.12 and version 3.12 of the Linux kernel. Small adjustments have been made to the project's system installer and initial configuration wizard, but we will get to those shortly. This release of Chakra is available as a single edition and I found only a 64-bit x86 build on the project's download page. The ISO I downloaded was approximately 1.8 GB in size.



Booting from Chakra's ISO brings up a boot menu offering a few choices. We can start a live desktop session (the default option), we can load the same live desktop session with non-free hardware drivers or we can launch a hardware detection utility. The hardware detection software brings up a simple menu system by which we can navigate information about our computer's hardware. Individual pieces of hardware are grouped in categories to make it easier to discover exactly what our computer has hidden inside its case. Taking the boot menu's live desktop offering quickly brings us to the KDE desktop. The interface is presented in a classic manner with the application menu, task switcher and system tray all placed at the bottom of the display. On the desktop we find a welcome widget which features two tabs. One tab contains informative notes on using Chakra and the project's design. Along the bottom of this widget we see links to the project's website, system installer and documentation. The second tab of the welcome widget displays project news and announcements. Speaking of the Chakra website, the project has a really nice wiki and starting guide for newcomers. This guide contains detailed information on installing and running Chakra, including tips for working with the system installer and package manager.







Chakra GNU/Linux 2014.02 - the Tribe system installer

(full image size: 427kB, screen resolution 1280x1024 pixels)



Chakra's system installer is called Tribe and it is a graphical application which bears a passing resemblance to Kubuntu's installer. Tribe starts off by showing us the project's release notes and we are then asked to confirm our keyboard's layout. The installer then shows us a globe we can rotate and zoom in on in order to select our location. The installer then attempts to use the given location to determine our preferred language, a setting we can override if need be. Up next is a screen which handles disk partitioning and I grew concerned when the disk partitioning screen simply showed me a blank page with three buttons at the bottom. One button appeared to be a refresh button and another was labeled "Format". The third button was labeled "Advanced" and I clicked this one.



The Advanced button brought up a message saying no devices could be found. Now I knew I had a disk attached to the system, the Chakra hardware detection tool had correctly identified it moments earlier. I closed the installer and attempted to launch the KDE Partition Manager which also told me it couldn't find any devices with which to work. I then dropped to a command line and used the text-based program cfdisk to create a new partition layout and new partitions for me. Then, when I went back into the Tribe application, I found it was able to correctly detect my newly created partitions and I was able to use the installer to assign mount points to my partitions. We then have the chance to create user accounts, multiple accounts if we would like. I decided to create two. From there the installer asked if I would like to copy all of the Chakra packages from my installation media onto the local hard drive or, alternatively, I could selectively download categories of software from online repositories. The latter option may be slower, but it lets us start with only the software we want, producing a leaner install.



There did not appear to be any way to selectively install packages available on the local media. I decided to install everything from the local media. We are then shown a confirmation screen where our selected settings are shown to us and the installer waits for permission to proceed. Files are then copied to our local hard drive and, when the process is finished, we can optionally choose to customize the system's initial ramdisk and install the GRUB2 boot loader. The boot loader installs by default, which is good, most people will want this. The initial ramdisk customization is less likely to be used, but it allows us to provide device or network support to the operating system early in the boot process should we need it. With those steps completed Chakra's installer declared it was done and I rebooted the computer.



The first time we boot into Chakra the operating system proceeds directly to the KDE desktop environment and loads a configuration wizard. This wizard walks us through several steps, most of them relating to the look and feel of our graphical user interface. For instance, we are asked which popular folders we want placed in our home directory with possible options including Documents, Video and Music. We can tell KDE to use a single click or double-click of the mouse to open files and folders and we can choose whether our mouse is set up to be left- or right-handed. We can choose our preferred application menu layout, our favourite background, whether or not the keyboard's meta key should open the application menu and how often to check for software updates. We also get into system-wide settings such as whether to run printing and anti-virus services. The wizard is nicely laid out and each configuration step comes with a brief explanation of what we are doing. After we get to the last step we are dropped at our newly configured KDE desktop.







Chakra GNU/Linux 2014.02 - the Welcome widget and default desktop theme

(full image size: 1,555kB, screen resolution 1280x1024 pixels)



Previously I mentioned creating two user accounts during the install process and it surprised me a little to discover Chakra automatically logged me in as the first of these two users. In fact at every boot the first user was automatically logged in despite having a password on the account. A quick trip to the KDE System Settings panel corrected this and future boot-ups brought me to a graphical login screen. Other things I soon noticed were that KDE had some basic visual effects enabled by default and the interface was surprisingly fast. I do not think I have experienced a KDE 4 installation which was as responsive and smooth as the one which Chakra ships. Even with file indexing and visual effects enabled, even when running in a virtual machine, Chakra's implementation of KDE was very responsive. What it was not was light on memory, using approximately 420 MB of RAM when sitting idle at the desktop.



Chakra GNU/Linux 2014.02 comes with a collection of software which is mostly associated with the KDE desktop. I am of the opinion that functionality and practicality have been sacrificed in some cases in the name of KDE/Qt purity. Going through the application menu we find the Rekonq web browser, the Konversation IRC client, the KGet download manager and the Calligra productivity suite. We find the Okular document viewer, the k3b disc burning software, the Dragon Player multimedia player and the Amarok music player. There is an Amazon music downloading client, a partition manager and the KGpg encryption and key management software. The KDE System Settings panel is present, giving us the ability to configure, in detail, the look and feel of the user interface.



NetworkManager and the KPPP dial-up networking software are included to help us get online. There are some other small utilities which help us manage user accounts, discover information about our hardware, edit text files and work with file archives. The GNU Compiler Collection is installed for us and Chakra comes with popular multimedia codecs. There is no Flash support by default, but it can be added from the project's software repositories. One sub-category of the application menu contains links which open our web browser to the Chakra website. These links bring us directly to documentation, forums or the bug tracker, which is convenient. In the background Chakra comes with the Linux kernel, version 3.12.







Chakra GNU/Linux 2014.02 - the KDE System Settings panel

(full image size: 512kB, screen resolution 1280x1024 pixels)



While playing around with Chakra GNU/Linux 2014.02 I noticed a few minor issues. One was that the Marble desktop globe application would not load, the software immediately crashed when I attempted to open it. I found that Chakra supported playing audio files, including mp3s, right out of the box. However, when I tried to open any video files the Dragon Player media player would open, play the video for a second or two and then crash. To get around this problem I installed the VLC multimedia player from Chakra's repositories and found VLC was able to play all of my video files without any problem.



The subject of installing software brings us to Oktopi, Chakra's graphical package manager. Oktopi acts as a graphical front-end to the Pacman command-line package manager and has a layout which reminds me of Synaptic. We are shown a simple list of available packages in alphabetical order and icons next to each package let us know its status (installed, available or upgradeable). We can search for software by name or description and we can filter software based on its status. We can use the package manager to create batches of actions (install, remove or upgrade). While a batch of actions is being processed, the package manager locks up and a terminal window opens, showing us Pacman's progress. Optionally, Oktopi can check the Chakra website for project news. By default there are no GTK+-based applications available to us in the software repositories. We can get GTK+-based software by editing Pacman's configuration file and enabling the project's Extra repository. From then on, programs built with GTK+ will show up in the package manager.



While using Oktopi I found the package manager generally worked well. It was fast and easy to navigate and search results were returned almost instantly. I did run into two quirks though. The first was that I had to enter my password every time I wanted to perform an action. Really, this wasn't a problem, but it did slow down the process of installing new software and it would be nice if the application would remember my credentials. The other issue was that Oktopi (and Pacman) would sometimes report my system was more up to date than the project's repositories. I double-checked the version numbers of some local packages, notably the members of the Calligra suite, and confirmed my local software had a higher version number than the software offered in the repositories. This caused some warnings from the package manager, but otherwise didn't result in any problems.







Chakra GNU/Linux 2014.02 - package management using Oktopi

(full image size: 424kB, screen resolution 1280x1024 pixels)



Conclusions



Earlier I mentioned that the Chakra project is one I have enjoyed watching grow and mature. The developers are certainly trying something unusual with their semi-rolling, KDE-focused distribution with its custom installer. The Chakra project ships cutting-edge software and has (for a Linux distribution) a tight focus, providing just a single, 64-bit edition of their operating system. Throughout my time with Chakra (both this week and in trials past) I found myself regularly flipping back and forth between thinking, "This is great!" and "Oh, wait, why is it doing that?" The Tribe system installer features a good example of this duality when it first shows us a beautiful globe set against a night sky where we can rotate and zoom to select our location and, then, a minute later, the partition manager couldn't find my hard drive.



The graphical package manager shipping with this release has a nice, simple approach and reminds me of the reliable Synaptic package manager. I was impressed with the package manager's speed and simplicity. But then I ran into a problem which confused me and, seemingly, the package manager too when it reported my copy of Chakra was more up to date than the project's software repositories. In a similar vein it was nice to have multimedia support out of the box, but I was frustrated when multiple video formats would cause the default media player to crash. As another example, I think it is great the system installer supports creating multiple users, but then why does Chakra automatically login one user account when we create multiple users? That seems like a potential security problem.



The short version of all this is Chakra has some nice features and it does some interesting things. I love how amazingly fast the project's build of KDE is on my hardware and I like that the project does some things a bit differently. I like that the team has put together an increasingly comprehensive collection of documentation. I especially appreciate that GTK-based software is no longer shipped in stand-alone bundles, but rather in an add-on repository, allowing the user to add software using a single package manager, rather than switching between different software managers. In short, I feel Chakra has made positive progress over the past year. The distribution still has rough edges, plenty of small, unpleasant surprises for the unwary user, but overall it is improving. The project is well worth a look if you are a fan of either Arch Linux or the KDE desktop.



* * * * * Hardware used in this review



My physical test equipment for this review was a desktop HP Pavilon p6 Series with the following specifications:

Processor: Dual-core 2.8 GHz AMD A4-3420 APU

Storage: 500 GB Hitachi hard drive

Memory: 6 GB of RAM

Networking: Realtek RTL8111 wired network card

Display: AMD Radeon HD 6410D video card