Chakra the little project that couldn't

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Chakra the little project that couldn't (Not 56k friendly)

So its been a while since I have found something I felt compelled to review. I have always sort of followed Arch Linux and have flirted with it from time to time so when I heard about Chakra I thought hey, this is right up my alley!

Turns out, not so much (please note that this is still in Alpha). I started my adventure by trying to install in a virtual machine. This was about the worst experience I have had in a virtual machine. But before I get into that, I should first describe my system specs

I have the following laptop I was testing it on

HP Pavillion DV6000

AMD TK-53 dual core proc. (stock 1.7 ghz)
3 gigs of DDR2 ram
160 gig 7200 rpm hard drive
Nvidia 7300M

So its not top of the line, but it should, in theory be able to handle almost any OS one throws at it.

So on with the show.

The first thing that I noticed was that there was no direct install option during the boot process. This meant that you are forced to view the livecd environment.



The login screen is nice to look at and generally very stylish. Their desktop of choice is KDE, which may not be my personal preference but it looks good with their dark theme.


However thats where my good experience came to an abrupt end. The OS ran like absolute sludge in the virtual machine. I thought 'ok, its probably because its running in the live environment in a virtual machine.'

So off I went to the races installing it. To their credit they do put out a warning that this is Alpha software, and while I realize that Alpha software is not meant to be used in a production environment, it should be, at a bare minimum, usable. (more on this later)



Among the first options the user is presented is a list of 4 or 5 licence agreements which they can choose to decline. This is regards to closed software such as flash and some closed drivers.


After this the guys at Chakra have developed a bit of a different spin on picking your local



You are presented with a globe that has many dots on it with relation to your city preference. I found that clicking on the Toronto city (my city) did not automatically adjust the settings, but clicking on the Detroit city did..



Its interesting because they have links to finding out more information about the cities that you click on. Its a neat little touch.

Another interesting option they give you during the install process is setting up Ram disks. I left everything at the default here


For those tweakers out there I can see this being well received.

 

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Similar to Gentoo and other distros, Chakra gives you the option of dealing with mirrors yourself or leaving things as the developers have determined



After going through these options I finally got to the disk partitioning section



I had rather large problems here, this I found out later was due to using a virtual machine and not through the fault of the devs.
Essentially I had to dismiss the box on the left in order to be able to actually select any disks (if that makes any sense?). Eventually my screen looked like this:





After finishing the disk partitions I was off to the races as they say! (if the race was between two mentally challenged snails going backwards that is...)


The install took almost 4 hours to complete during which time I did NOTHING else on the computer. Yikes! I guess I have been spoiled by the 15 minute installs of Ubuntu, Mint and others.

When I was finally up and ready to go I was excited to see and use my new machine. The problem was that it was virtually unusable. There was lag everywhere and using the internet browser (Aura) was horribly slow at all times.

 

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I also found that relative to other distros, Chakra was a bit of a space hog (my current install of Mint has a lot of extra things installed, media players, wine, playonlinux etc and it reaches 3.5 gigs used). After about 15 minutes of fiddling with virtualbox settings I gave up and dumped the virtual machine.

Thus ended my adventure for a few days. Two nights ago, I decided to give it free reign on my laptop and just installed it right beside Linux Mint. Much to my disappointment, most of my grievances in the virtual machine followed me.

When I booted off the cd I tried the same method I had in the VM, booting without the proprietary drivers (as it gives you the option to boot with or without them... sorry no screen shot this time). The computer simply would not boot regardless of what I did. So I rebooted (as the computer had hung indefinitely, a cold boot was required) and selected the proprietary drivers and all seemed good for a time. It still took almost 10 minutes to get into the live environment (where I could actually click around).

Even with the drivers installed, my wireless did not work. Generally I am more suprised IF they work on a livecd, so this was not out of the ordinary.

After going through all of the steps I had with the virtual machine I set it to installing. Even sans the VM it took almost 3 hours to complete the installation. Once the installation had finished I rebooted into my fresh installation. Guess what? My wireless worked out of the box! "Hurray" I thought this seems promising, as did the slight performance increase that I had noticed over the VM.

 

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That is, however, where my pleasant experiences ended with Chakra. I tried to run the pacman update from the command line according to their wiki. I got one package downloaded and then the update died due to dependency issues. I realize this is not Chakra's fault per se but it was something that was irritating.

So giving up on the command line, I tried to open Shaman, which is the graphical front end for pacman. It came installed by default (as seen in one of the screen shots earlier). It however would not open. Running it from the command line produced no output. When I tried to update/reinstall Shaman, it said it was already installed and the current version, did I want to continue? Indicating yes, pacman did its thing and I tried to launch Shaman again to no avail.

So did I give up? Not quite yet. Instead I went to good ol' interweb to solve my problems, only to discover another problem. My internet was outrageously slow! I mean dial up slow. I had to let youtube buffer the entire file, web pages (even mostly text like wiki) opened molasses-in-February slow in both konquerer and aura so I installed firefox but that didnt fix the problem. Thinking it may be my internet I grabbed my linux mint live cd and web pages loaded what seemed to be blazing fast compared to my last hour in Arch/Chakra.

Normally I am the first to suggest user error when dealing with things like arch linux or compiling for source etc. However the focus of Chakra seems to be to provide a semi-automatic installation/configuration process. Given that, I have to say that this is one of the worst experiences I have had with a linux distro.

Could my problems have been related to the newest kernel/pacman/whatever? Sure it could, but there was no way for me to really know this. All I know is that this distro had eaten over 20 hours of my computers life and I was able to do LESS with it then I could before.
The project has good intentions and whether it was the devs, or something between Arch and my HP I'll never know.

I might check this out when it hits beta, but for now I suggest steering clear.


What I liked
-Wireless worked after installation
-Ambitious to provide user friendliness to Arch
-Option of installing proprietary software and drivers off the start
-Ramdisk options
-Local selection process

What I didn't like
-Installation time
-Update didnt work
-Ridiculously poor internet browsing
-Did I mention installation time?
-LiveCD boot time coupled with no option go directly to the installer
-Shaman would not launch

User-Friendliness 8/10 (provided everything worked)
Ease of Use 3/10
Networking 6/10 (wireless worked without problems... slow overall internet experience)
Installation 5/10


Overall 5/10

[size=-3] Who am I?
By trade I am a Linux System Administrator for a large movie studio. I have achieved my masters in Political Science, and have been using Linux full time since 2005. I am not a paid journalist, or even part of the media as a whole. Just someone who aims to give realistic reviews about software and hardware in the Linux world. [/size]

 

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Hopefully these guys keep at it to make a really good end-user experience one day