chakra installed

I decided to go ahead and install Chakra 2013.02 (Benz) on my Compaq notebook, and it went well. When I clicked on the "Install Chakra" icon, I was taken to a "Welcome" screen, followed by release notes, where I found this interesting note:

“It is 3 years this week since the late Chakra-Project founder Jan Mette called a meeting to discuss his plans to have Chakra continue as an independent distribution. With this first release of 'Benz' (a code name that will follow the KDE 4.10 series), it would have been so nice to know if he'd agree with how the Chakra-Project team executed his dream. With the code name 'Benz' we are back to using names of famous engineers, with this one, we'd like to honor the German roots of Chakra by using one of the top German engineers...”

The installation, using the installer they call "Tribe," was fairly straightforward. I saw no way to install GRUB2 on Chakra's root partition, so I did the installation without installing GRUB2, then created a custom menu entry in Debian Wheezy's /etc/grub.d directory, and was able to use that to boot into Chakra.

During the installation, I added the "bundle" for the Chromium browser so that I could use that instead of Rekonq. Once I booted into the system, I updated with the following command:

# pacman -Syu

Then I installed KWrite and KCalc, which were not included, with these commands:

# pacman -S kwrite
# pacman -S kcalc

By default, Chakra comes with the Calligra office suite intead of LibreOffice. I decided to stay with Calligra for now. There are also community repositories, but I didn't go into that as I'm still trying to learn about Chakra and pacman.

Had no problems setting up the KDE 4.10 desktop, and everything looks good so far.

Seems like a good time to take a look at man pacman.