Thursday, November 15, 2012

Chakra 2012.10 - review

I have heard a lot about Chakra GNU/Linux, so finally I've decided to try it.


First, it was not so obvious when installing it on my USB pendrive. Finally I found the solution. You have to use the app called 'suse studio image writer' start it, when looking for *.raw images by default, you have to change it for *.*, select your Chakra iso and go... (by the way - that worked well with ROSA Marathon I tested yesterday).

Nice surprise! When choosing the restricted drivers boot option Chakra detected my NVIDIA and Broadcom wifi drivers correctly! Great on my Lenovo laptop!

KDE desktop v. 4.9.2 installed  by default is clean and nice, you feel nice aesthetics and a typical KDE/QT feeling - you even agree to the Chakra team's vision presenting pure QT environment, not a bad idea! I'm telling you! :)

However I found a few glitches. Flash plugin is not installed  I tried three ways:

- Getting the Chrome browser bundle (as GTK apps are provided in so called bundles, virtual file systems mounted somehow in the main system) - but it didn't work in Chakra 2012.10! I couldn't get the sound working in Youtube videos! Something here is not well prepared for users.

- Getting the flashplayer using pacman  didn't help - flash plugin didn't appear available.

- Getting the QupZilla browser with flash plugin attached - finally - success! That enabled me to listen to some YT favourite songs.


Finally, I have not decided to install Chakra on my hdd, I will certainly look at it in the future, testing and trying out. The con is that I am a XFCE type of man, the pro is that Chakra is, or at least was, Arch based, which means the well known system structure and relative speed, at the same time making vicious Arch way of updating a little more peaceful (a semi-rolling model).

My recommendation? Give it a try, it's interesting and promising!

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