I did this long-term review on my normal UROP desktop computer with the
64-bit edition of the OS. Follow the jump to see how it fared. Also do
note that there are more days logged because I intend to use it for
about 60-80 full hours of work, which is the equivalent of 7-10 full
days in the summer, though now I am working on a part-time basis as
classes have started.
The boot menu looks really nice, with icons next to the boot menu entries; unfortunately, this is a little undercut by the overlaying of a garish terminal cutout with a black background and white text over the smooth gray background of the boot menu whenever an option is selected. There was no boot splash, but that didn't matter a bit because the boot process was ridiculously fast. I think it booted in just over 5 seconds, and definitely under 10 seconds (from the boot menu), which is probably some kind of a record. After that came the login screen, which looks really slick with a large time/date stamp above the user selection menu and password text box.
Upon logging in for the first time, I was greeted by Kapudan, which is a port of the first-run wizard Kaptan from Pardus; it functions basically the same. I opted to use the KDE Lancelot menu, 4 virtual desktops, extra folders in the home folder, the same wallpaper, and the firewall. Unfortunately, while some of these changes like the menu were activated, others like the extra folders were not. Furthermore, Kapudan would start up even after the very first login, so I had to disable it and make the other necessary changes in Dolphin and in the KDE System Settings program. After those changes were made as in my review of the live session, other things went the same as in the live session, with one small change: the KDE Plasma widget for Redshift is no longer available in the Chakra Community Repository (CCR) for some reason, so I had to stick with the CLI version of Redshift. Also, Chakra was indeed much faster and snappier when installed than when used as a live USB; before installing anything new, I did a system update using "su" followed by "pacman -Syy" followed by "pacman -Syu", and that worked fine. Finally, my UROP work went fine today; over a month ago, I figured out how to access remote filesystems using Nautilus and Dolphin, and the method for Dolphin works just fine on Chakra.
Day 0
I tried the live session again using the same live USB made through the "dd" command. It worked fine as usual.Day 1
The installation process went fine, hasn't changed much from before, and didn't take too long; I kept the same partition layout as before, though I formatted both the root and home partitions to have a cleanly installed system. Also, I chose at the end of the installation to install the Mozilla Firefox bundle. Finally, I was a little concerned that GRUB might be installed in the root partition rather than the MBR, but thankfully, a reboot convinced me that this was not the case.The boot menu looks really nice, with icons next to the boot menu entries; unfortunately, this is a little undercut by the overlaying of a garish terminal cutout with a black background and white text over the smooth gray background of the boot menu whenever an option is selected. There was no boot splash, but that didn't matter a bit because the boot process was ridiculously fast. I think it booted in just over 5 seconds, and definitely under 10 seconds (from the boot menu), which is probably some kind of a record. After that came the login screen, which looks really slick with a large time/date stamp above the user selection menu and password text box.
Upon logging in for the first time, I was greeted by Kapudan, which is a port of the first-run wizard Kaptan from Pardus; it functions basically the same. I opted to use the KDE Lancelot menu, 4 virtual desktops, extra folders in the home folder, the same wallpaper, and the firewall. Unfortunately, while some of these changes like the menu were activated, others like the extra folders were not. Furthermore, Kapudan would start up even after the very first login, so I had to disable it and make the other necessary changes in Dolphin and in the KDE System Settings program. After those changes were made as in my review of the live session, other things went the same as in the live session, with one small change: the KDE Plasma widget for Redshift is no longer available in the Chakra Community Repository (CCR) for some reason, so I had to stick with the CLI version of Redshift. Also, Chakra was indeed much faster and snappier when installed than when used as a live USB; before installing anything new, I did a system update using "su" followed by "pacman -Syy" followed by "pacman -Syu", and that worked fine. Finally, my UROP work went fine today; over a month ago, I figured out how to access remote filesystems using Nautilus and Dolphin, and the method for Dolphin works just fine on Chakra.
