Kahel OS - Arch for people who like to tweak a little less

This is going to be quick as I am at work, but I had to put out there I am loving the new Kahel OS

It has the Arch base with a little more polish, setup right out of the box. As usual distrowatch has some good information on the project, but hasn't updated the page with the most recent release which is 050110-x86_64.iso or i386.

Some notes to keep in mind if testing it out:
1. If you do a manual partitioning the /boot partition _MUST_ be formatted ext2 or the install will fail. Who needs journaling on /boot anyways
2. As this is based on Arch linux, there is NO PAE kernel in the normal repos, unless you use AUR, so if you want more than 3GB go x64.
3. There is no livecd only installation, but everything works on my Thinkpad out of the box.

If you do try post your thoughts

 

Hate to say it, but that's actually pretty pathetic. Especially when you consider the anti-Windows cartoon on their main page.

 

I tried Kahel OS not too long ago but wasn't too impressed with it. Rather ordinary really even though it has its own original package manager. Kahel OS originates from the Philippines, if I recall correctly, with a very small crew that puts it together. They're forum is rather dead as well. I might try out their newest version just to see if it's improved any since my last venture.

I do like their cool, hip looking little mascot logo.

Later...

 

I don't get the correlation here?

If you just do a full HDD install it is fine. Also, keep in mind this is not a distro for persons new to the Linux world, it is based off of Arch


BTW- In windows 7 the 100MB partition for Bitlocker that is created on a fresh install has in many cases, created invalid partition tables... Happened to me.

I wasn't expecting much from this, but it is a great time saver in my opinion. It takes a while to configure Arch to a graphically usable state, here it is setup for you already with all the tweaks still able to be twisted to your liking over time. Lately I just don't have the time to dedicate to configuring Arch from scratch, so this is great for someone who wants the business end of Arch

 

The Arch forum guys skewered Kahel devs for this project, it was character assasination along with blatant skullduggery. I guess Arch folks like to keep their distro out of bounds for others with that attitude. Even though Kahel team took some liberties with arch, in the end, it was for a good cause, that is to srpead arch linux among those folks who find it daunting to say the least.

 

Or those who like the rolling release but don't want to, or have the time to, configure from the ground up.

Day #2 of testing.

 

I tried the latest Kahel OS yesterday on my old Sony S360 and actually it's not half bad. The install was very easy and intuitive...though it was a very long install. Gnome is the default (which I liked). No trouble setting up my wireless connection but it is an Intel card after all...heaven forbid if I tried it on my Lenovo with a Broadcom. The default browser is Chromium (5.0-something) but I quickly installed Firefox (3.6.3) due to flash issues with Chromium. Their package manager is quite usable (synaptic-like would be how I'd phrase it). They seem to have almost all the current packages available for download like VLC, Wine, AbiWord, etc..

One downside...you have to login each time you boot the system...no visible way to setup auto-login which is what I prefer.

It's not Ubuntu but overall I wouldn't kick it out of bed if it were the only distro I had available to use. I'd give it an 8 on a scale of 1 to 10.

Later...

 

If you like rolling releases, there is another excellent distro called sidux for you to try out.

 

Not a big fan of Sid(unstable), but maybe if I am feeling adventurous one day.

I'm likiing it too, simple effective, so far stable and quick! I boot to the login in under 30s and at a fully usuable desktop in uner 50s(compbined). So far I am at a 7/10 for this one, creeping towards 8 as you can use the LTS kernel from Arch also in this release. Nice.

 

sidux is sid done right, give it a spin