Oscar 01 is uploading!

Download Server Misbehaving.
I's not me, honest! I'm going to take advantage of thos temporary disruption by making a few more changes. Back up soon.


Download here.


The first Kiara live CD release, Oscar-00 was a pretty straightford attempt to beef up Slax with paore any of this KDE folderol really started up, I attempted to release a CD that showed off Konquerors exceptional power as a file manager by integrating it into fluxbox. I called it kickbox at the time. I've developed second tckages ported from Slackware with KDE 3.5.10 as the default desktop. Oscar-01 is where it starts to get interesting. Maybe a year and a half ago, before any of this KDE folderol really started up, I attempted to release a CD that showed off Konquerors exceptional power as a file manager by integrating it into fluxbox. I called it kickbox at the time. I've developed second thoughts about the name, but not about the concept. Being able to deploy Konqueror, especially Konqueror 3, with complete precision from the desktop with fluxbox's simple text-based logic is some powerful desktop juju, and it's extremely easy to program, even for a non-programmer. Plus, I've been doing this for about five years now, maybe longer, and I've learned a lot of tricks. I can't wait to show you.
It's a little rough around the edges. The fluxbox files for the root desktop just wouldn't take, no matter what I tried, so the default appears instead when the root account is booted graphically. This is important. Oscar is based on Slax, and Slax is the only desktop that just goes barreling into the X-root when you boot it.

I sort of take a preverse pleasure in this aspect of Slax. Most experienced Linux Babies know that using X-windows as root, a practice I call X-rooting, is risky and frowned upon. When I was a newbie, I used the X-root, because I didn't want to learn how to handle permissions from the CLI, and I got into a huge brawl in my favorite linux forum about it. It went on for days and days, me against everybody. These days, I rarely X-Root (except when using Slax, of course, which takes me here whether I want to go or not.) I still haven't learned how to handle permissions from the command line, but I have learned a bunch of other tricks.

To some, Slax's habit of going straight to where it's never supposed to go is careless at best and foolhardy at worst, but I think those people are wrong. In my opinion, if you care enough to secure your live CD session by performing a couple of simple commands and typing in a couple of passwords, from a security standpoint you'll be better off without some of the elaborate schemes that other live CDs use to avoid the X-root.

But I'm moving away from my point, which is that what's mostly missing from this release is some special custom menus for the root user, so that when you find yourself dropped into the X-Root by Kiara, ( which it does because it's based on Slax, which only does what it inherited from Slackware), you've got some nice user-friendly resources for securing your system with a normal user account. Instead it's just a dumb default menu with an almost random list of applications, and no desktop background. And that's another thing. If the first thing the user sees is the Root User's graphical desktop, you want it to look good, right.

So, in spite of my high hopes, this is not ready for prime time... but it's a good solid step toward the Powerful Desktop Mojo that I promise is to come. The upload is almost completed now.