Chakra Claire comes with its share of new and old/updated features. One new feature (if it qualifies as a feature) that will affect what type of machine you can install it on, is that support for i686 platforms was discontinued. Which means that only a 64-bit installation image was released.
I do not know of any other distribution that has taken this step, and I am not sure what the long-term impact on the adoption of Chakra will be. Time will tell.
Another new feature that shipped with Chakra 2012.08, is Kapudan, a port of Kaptan, the graphical desktop customization utility in Pardus. Kaptan and Kapudan, are run on first boot, and can be run at any other time. It helps users customize several aspects of their desktop. It is the type of application that I think every distribution should have. (See Every distribution should have its own Kapudan.) Note: Kaptan is Turkish for “Captain,” but Kapudan does not really mean anything. It is just a spin on the original name.
This is Kapudan’s welcome screen. Its interface is all point-and-click.
A feature that Kapudan allows you to customize if the style of menu to use. In Pardus’ Kaptan, there are three, but that number rose to four in Kapudan. The Takeoff Launcher is the extra one in Kapudan.
Also new in this release, is KDE 4.9, updated to 4.9.1 in the September release. The desktop with the Kickoff menu is shown in the image below. As stated earlier, it is just one of four menu styles you can chose from Kapudan. The others are theTakeoff Launcher, Lancelot, and the Simple or Classic menu.
This is the same desktop with the Takeoff Launcher and a different wallpaper. Unlike with the Kickoff and Lancelot menus, there is no visible search box on the Takeoff Launcher, but start typing and it appears automatically, or automagically.
Since this is KDE, we must also mention the Netbook interface, even though it is doubtful that anybody still uses it, or has even used it for serious stuff. The KDE Plasma Netbook interface is actually fun to use, but for some reason, it never really became popular. Shown here, is the desktop as seen from the KDE Plasma Netbook interface.
A step in Kapudan lets you see all the security tools that you may use to secure your installation of Chakra 12.08. Aside from the firewall, which is installed but not enabled, the others have to be installed and configured. So, while you can just click to enable the firewall, clicking on, say, the Tomoyo-tools button will open a Web page that provides instructions on how to configure it. It would have been better if clicking on that button enabled and configured it. Maybe it will be so in a future release. The screen shot below shows the step in Kapudan.
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