Chakra, a fast, user-friendly and extremely powerful Live CD and/or distrolet based on the award winning KDE and on the GNU/Linux.

Chakra is a user-friendly and powerful distribution and live CD based on Arch Linux. It features a graphical installer, automatic hardware detection and configuration, the latest KDE desktop, and a variety of tools and extras.

History.

Chakra was born on the net, in a small shady corner of the Freenode network, where the KDEmod developers met one day and decided to create an awesome little liveCD based on Arch Linux. Of course these goals had to be emphasized a little bit more, and soon after the initial thoughts and discussions we started to write up plans, schedules and of course develop like there is no tomorrow, while not forgetting the fun and keeping it relaxed. Chakra is our baby. A lot of efforts, time and countless hours of writing code and testing stuff have been put into it so far, and that is just the beginning...

Goals.

Our goal with Chakra is to provide a operating system for desktops that is easy to use, but still has all the functionality, clarity, power and speediness of a KISS operating system. In the long term, we want to build an operating system based on Arch Linux that meets most requirements desktop users have today, like easy installation of software, graphical system administration, configuring power management on mobile devices or sharing an internet connection. To be better able to fulfill this goal, we strongly rely on users who report bugs, send in feature requests and ideas for improvements, and of course participate in development.

Although this might sound like a distro for Linux newbies, these are not our primary target audience, at least not for the moment. Chakra is made for techy people and competent GNU/Linux users with a passion for KDE, KISS and such stuff, who dont fear to get their hands dirty but want to set up a usable desktop system quickly and easily.

Freedom.

"Free software" is a matter of liberty, not just price. Chakra and all its appendant software and scripts are free software, as in “free speech”, not as in “free beer”. We are proud to develop free software, because it makes a difference. However, to offer our users the smoothest possible experience we occasionally bend the rules and bundle proprietary drivers and software if no viable free alternative is available. As we also believe in choice, all proprietary software can be disabled at system startup (for drivers) and in our installer (for anything else).

Update:

Phil Miller has announced the availability of the fifth and final milestone release of Chakra GNU/Linux 2011.04, a KDE-centric distribution based on Arch Linux: "Almost two weeks have passed since our last milestone release. We are now proud to present our fifth and last milestone before the final release of 'Aida', planed for the 22nd of April. We have fixed KDE 4.6.2 and some other packages to get it much more stable than before. The Burg installation system got improved and it now includes GPT support. Also the WLAN detection in live-mode works now, so you have instant Internet access for installing language packs using Tribe, our installer. Appset-Qt is included in version 0.4.0, fully translated and with the support of CCR, our community repository."

More details in the release announcement.

Download: chakra-2011.04-ms5-i686.iso (691MB, MD5), chakra-2011.04-ms5-x86_64.iso (700MB, MD5).

Recent releases:

• 2011-04-14: Development Release: Chakra GNU/Linux 2011.04 Milestone 5
• 2011-04-04: Development Release: Chakra GNU/Linux 2011.04 Milestone 4
• 2011-03-20: Development Release: Chakra GNU/Linux 2011.04 Milestone 3
• 2011-02-17: Development Release: Chakra GNU/Linux 0.4 Beta 2
• 2011-01-31: Distribution Release: Chakra GNU/Linux 0.3.2
• 2011-01-11: Distribution Release: Chakra GNU/Linux 0.3.1

The Chakra developers are working in a set of specific tools and scripts for fit the Chakra needs. Our full working projects are listed here, but we've some other in the pocket awaiting the needed stability for being released soon.

You can find some more projects in our source code repositories.

Tribe (System Installer)	CInstall (Package manager)	LiveScripts2 (Live Media Creation)

General Information
Learn more about the Chakra community and its software, and find information to help you get started. Reading the FAQ might answer a lot of questions you might have ...


Chakra	FAQ

Chakra Repositories	Bundles

Help
Need some help? Here are some suggested places where you can get help with problems, as well some hints on how to improve the quality of answers you receive.