It's been more than two years since my last thread about KIARA, my own live CD based on SLAX 6.1.2 and Slackware 12.2, so I feel justified in starting over. I've been wanting to write some documentation for Kiara, and I'm thinking that maybe I'll find it easier to write here, where maybe someone will read it.
KIARA ("Kiara Is A Recursive Acronym") is not a great feat on my part, but it happens to be a great live CD. It started out a couple of years ago as a way for me to insure that I could keep using KDE3 no matter what.
I'm no guru. What I did to create my own version of Slax was not that complicated, and that's no coincidence. Slax is not that complicated, because it builds so directly on the simplicity of Slackware, and it's built to customize. One of the things that makes Slackware important is that its special simplicity allowed for some terrific second-generation distros. Besides Slax, there's also zenwalk, and a special favorite of mine, Vector Linux.
Here's basically what what I did, and if anybody wants more detail, I'll supply it. I took the basic 100 MB Slax disk and ported packages from Slackware by running the tgz2lzm script (converting to .tgz slackware packages to .lzm slax modules) and added the files that were generated to the "modules" folder in the Slax CD. These included all KDE3 packages for a full-featured desktop, some packages that I considered essential for console operatiion such as GNU emacs, elinks and requested packages like nano, and also some alternative desktop guis like fluxbox, twm and xfce (there was room, so why not?)
I also learned how to use the "rootcopy"directory in the slax CD to make customizations-- cosmetic at first, but over time more significant. Most importantly, I learned how to keep the mozilla web software current, and how to create startup scripts that would link the new browsers to the path.
I made my peace with KDE4 long ago, with one big exception: Someone recently gave me an old IBM Thinkpad, and no distro that I tried will run KDE4 on that thing no matter what. Sometimes it won't launch at all, but usually it's just too slow to be feasible. KIARA, however, runs with KDE3 very nicely on the Thinkpad, from a USB thumbdrive.
Nevertheless, on everything else I've got, KDE4 runs just a little bit slower, but not bad, and I like some of the features. I've learned what's useful and what's not useful in KDE4 and at last no longer tempted to endlessly dick around with all those crazy features. But even with KDE4 no longer an issue,. KIARA still seems worth doing. Most of it is never upgraded, except for the web software, and so I am able to pay special;l attention to keeping the web software current. It is the only live CD I know that continually upgrades the web browsers. With new versions of firefox, thunderbird, seamonkey, and opera, Slackware 12 and KDE3 don't really seem out of date at all. The web has changed over the past couple of years, but text editing is still text editing. I used to say that the only thing I ever missed in KIARA was a feature in Gimp, but with the recent changes in GIMP, I think I prefer the version in KIARA. (But I'll probably get used to the New Gimp, like I got used to KDE4.)
http://www.kiaragnulinux.blogspot.com
