Chakra, A user-friendly distribution using the KDE desktop

Speaker: Laszlo Papp

Soon we will hopefully provide a stable Chakra system. We would like to present it directly to the KDE users, developers and the community overall on the Akademy. Since our last version, lots of changes have happened, we think we are creating a useful distribution for KDE users, developers and we want to present it to the KDE community so that we can all take advantage of that. Chakra was born on the internet, in a small shady corner of the freenode network, where the KDEmod developers met one day and decided to create a tidy, efficient Live CD based on Arch Linux. There will be some discussion about Chakra's relation to Arch Linux, which was the base of the whole project. We created it because there is nothing like Chakra yet, and we wanted to create our “dream distribution” and implement our own concepts about how a GNU/Linux distribution should look and feel. KDEmod is a tweaked, modular package set of the K Desktop Environment that has been optimized for efficiency. Our KDE packages contain numerous additional patches that provide eye candy, functionality and a slightly enhanced Qt installation, plus a completely customized default theme. The KDE packages are almost vanilla, apart from some little fixes and the occasional backported feature. The rolling release model of arch is not suitable for what we want to achieve. We would like to establish basically a half-rolling release model to provide a stable system to users, which is exactly what they need now. Certain updates are breaking systems which, at times, may need manual intervention. The package manager is an important part of this project, so we will also discuss how Chakra has started to offer new ways of UI interaction, using package manager extensions. The Chakra Project is growing more and more; a large number of users are helping us by translating the parts of our distribution to other languages. Collaborate; use the forums, the bugtracker, the wiki, IRC, mailing lists et cetera. Be a good user, not just a ”consumer”.

Laszlo Papp

Laszlo graduated in electric engineering. He is a 24 year old embedded Linux developer employed in image/video processing projects, with a genuine interest in intelligent, smart embedded systems. He is a KDE contributor since the beginning of this year, focusing mainly on shaman, lokalize and chakra related Qt/KDE projects and recently, he has been trying to coordinate the KDE Hungarian Translation Team members. Hobbies include hacking on Free Software, playing Bass Guitar.