With this fourth and final "Claire" release, (a codename that followed the KDE SC 4.9 series, and dedicated to the memory of Claire Lotion) The Chakra Project Team would like to make this final ISO announcement of the year, also a report of the state of The Chakra-Project.


In the spring it was decided to work on a full switch to Systemd, the October ISO was the first to ship it as default. Now that the bulk of that big change is done, all team members have had a chance to work on Tribe features, fixing bugs reported in our tracker (the number of bugs was cut in half), steadily continuing to work on our own package-manager "Akabei", working on a complete redesign of the website. On top of this, the always present work of keeping packages updated as set in the goals of this half rolling distribution.

Tribe has reached the beta stage. New features: a fully functional bundle download page, user creation page is completely overhauled and expanded, with a password strength meter added, more locales including extra keyboard options.
Akabei is close to the second Alpha release. The first Alpha showed it was functional for the basic tasks, since then a lot of refinement has gone into the polkit integration.
Website is in the final re-design stage, next step will be the actual implementation.
Donations to paypal and flattr are flowing in steadily , so the continuation of being able to have our own server is funded.
Bundle-system is being developed to be able to use less mountpoints and to hide them from the list of mountpoints, will start seeing testing in 2-3 weeks


Among updates on this release, KDE 4.9.4 (includes 71 bug fixes since 4.9.3), Linux 3.6.6, Kmod 0.11, new toolchain including GCC 4.7.2, Qt 4.8.4, Libpng, Libtiff & Glew stack, Calligra 2.5.4 to name a few.


As with the previous release, Chakra is no longer shipping a GUI for package management. Appset-qt was the GUI for pacman, but was not handling complex updates as should, so it is dropped from this ISO. In the initial phase of using a built from scratch package manager, there will be no GUI for package management either, so this is a good time to let any user get accustomed to this situation. Pacman is the cli frontend for package management, the online package viewer is there for additional info and searches.


It was decided to no longer provide an i686 ISO. You can read more on this decision in this news article.


Chakra is offering an ISO version that includes all the language packs, many standard KDE apps, the new calligra 2.5.4, amarok, kde-telepathy, spideroak, printer support, minitube, k3b to name a few.


With this release we offer:

- KDE 4.9.4

- Linux 3.6.6 (3.0.43 optional)

- DVD image, including all locales and a nice selections of apps

- Kapudan, Chakra's desktop greeter, and all around first setup tool

- Artwork theme called "Dharma"

- Latest Grub2-2.00, including graphical dharma theme, Qt 4.8.4

- Enhancements to Chakra tools like cbundle/cinstall, welcome-plasmoid, tribe and spun

- Updated systemd, kmod, mkinitcpio, filesystem, latest proprietary graphics drivers, including the all new catalyst-legacy

- Latest toolchain with gcc 4.7.2, updated libpng, libtiff and glew stack


You can install additional packages from our repositories.


A good start is to read our Wiki or visit our Forums. To create reliable installation media, please follow the instructions in the wiki. Chakra's ISO's do not support unetbootin, and DVDs need a burn speed no higher than 4x.

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Links:

Download: Images at SourceForge
Wiki: bootable USB-FlashDrive creation
Wiki: Alternate bootable USB-FlashDrive creation
Chakra Beginners Guide