14 DAY TRIAL // Chakra Linux, a distribution specifically built to take advantage of KDE Software Compilation and the Plasma desktop, has been promoted to version 2014.09.
The last update for this distribution was made back in May and the system back then used KDE 4.13. It was one of the first ones to implement it and now the devs want to do the same with KDE 4.14.
The Chakra Linux developers made some big adjustments to KDE and that can be easily seen from the screenshots that you can find in the gallery below. Many distributions that integrate KDE usually present themselves with a rather dull, ordinary, and default desktop experience, but that's not the case with Chakra.
Details form the Chakra Linux makers
"The Chakra team is happy to announce the first release of the Chakra Euler series, which will follow the 4.14 KDE releases. A noticeable change in this release is the major face-lift of Kapudan, which now gives the option to users to enable the [extra] repository during first boot so they can easily install the most popular GTK-based applications. Kudos to george2 for the development and Malcer for the artwork. As always, many updates to packages are available after installation," is noted on the official website.
Chakra Linux 2014.09 has so many updated packages and other changes that it's even hard to list them all. For example, KDE SC 3.14.1 has been implemented in the operating system, it's still supported by the KDE project, but it will have the last update in November. Also, the Linux kernel used by the distro is now 3.15.15, which is a weird choice because this particular branch has reached end of life a while ago. It's very likely that a new update of the kernel is due to happen soon.
Other changes include a new dependency for networkmanager, which is dhcpcd, the xorg-server 1.15.2 package, systemd 216, Nvidia 340.31, Catalyst 14.4, xf86-video-nouveau 1.0.10, xf86-video-ati 7.4.0, xf86-video-intel 2.21.15, and Mesa 10.2.6.
It's also worth noting that the catalyst-legacy package is no longer included in the repos because it doesn't have support for the latest X.org server, so if you have an older video card you really need to use the open source drivers (fgrlx).
Tribe, the installer used by the distro, doesn't have support for UEFI, RAID, LVM, and GPT. There are some workarounds, but it would be nice to test it on something that does't have UEFI or at least provides Legacy support.
You can download Chakra Linux 2014.05 right now from Softpedia and give it a spin. It's a Live CD and works very well with virtual machines.
