Review: Chakra 2011.02 "Cyrus"

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Chakra GNU/Linux has become one of the distributions I now test regularly. Its appeal to me lies in the fact that it is based on Arch Linux (and is therefore comparatively quick and configurable), yet it comes with KDE already configured along with a more user-friendly system installer and package manager. I've already tested versions Alpha 5 "Panora", 0.2.0 "Jaz", and 0.3.0 "Ashoc". I figured I would test version 0.4.0 "Cyrus" whenever it got released, so I chose to wait until the news showed up on DistroWatch to test it. Unfortunately, that never happened; the latest news regarding this release was about 0.4.0 "Cyrus" Beta 2. Then, two days ago, I saw a news entry on DistroWatch about Chakra, specifically regarding version 2011.04 "Aida" Milestone 3. I wondered if the 0.4.0 "Cyrus" release had been scrapped entirely, so I headed to the Chakra website to check it out. It turns out that version 2011.02 "Cyrus" (renumbered from 0.4.0 for reasons I will also talk about shortly) was released in February itself and is now the current stable release; it was just never announced on DistroWatch. Darn it! Why doesn't anyone tell me these things?

As I just mentioned, the numbering changed from 0.4.0 to 2011.02. It looks like the Chakra developers moved away from the goal of a stable 1.0 release and chose to emphasize the rolling-release cutting-edge nature of Chakra by switching to a year-month numbering system. That said, the old numbering system clearly showed that Chakra is still alpha-release software; I don't know if I'm supposed to think the same thing with the current numbering system — more on that later.

I tested Chakra in VirtualBox with 1024 MB of RAM allocated to the guest OS and an available 10 GB virtual hard drive for installation. In response to a couple comments as well as articles on other blogs that I have seen, this is for a few reasons: I can't make a Chakra live USB without wiping it clean (dd) and I don't have too many blank CDs/DVDs lying around for these purposes, I can better control how Chakra responds in lower-resource environments (though admittedly 1 GB is still plenty), and I don't need to worry about messing up my installed systems on my computer. Follow the jump to see what it's like.

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Programming is Creative

I was reading FSDaily (or something like that) a few days ago when I came across this submitted article.
The blog author posits in this article that the reason software shouldn't be patentable is because it is, at its core, a very large binary number. The author elaborates by saying that if one was to create a program that wrote a random series of binary digits to a file in an infinite loop and this program was repeated ad infinitum, eventually every program ever devised in the past, present, and future would be (re)created.
Upon reading this article at first, I was taken by the argument and by its simplicity. However, [this information is strictly private], I realized that this particular argument against software patents falls flat. This is because of the Infinite Monkey Theorem. (Wikipedia is an excellent resource with regard to this. For the readers who choose not to trouble themselves with clicking on another link, the Infinite Monkey Theorem states that if a monkey typed at a typewriter continuously for all of eternity, eventually the monkey would type out every work mankind has ever written. Traditionally, this is stated as "the monkey would eventually type out all the works of Shakespeare", and I will go with this statement for argument's sake.)
One could similarly posit that all the works of Shakespeare are merely very long strings of characters from a set of 27, and that they could similarly be taken at random. Yet this seems to make Shakespeare less of a genius.
Similarly, calling a computer program "just a number" demeans the work a programmer must put in to actually arrive at that "number".
Of course, this doesn't mean that software should be patentable. All this means is that programming is a creative work and programs aren't "just numbers" any more than books are just very long strings of letters, spaces, and punctuation; hence, the argument against software patents should not rest on calling software "just a number".

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