Friday, December 18, 2009

Kiara 09, stripped down, a new version of Firefox, that's about it.



Hey, it's Christmas, and I am, as the kids used to say back when I was a kid, "in a bad place". It sort of a holiday tradition with me. As I move from early middle age to middle middle age, I need to lose 20 pounds lest I become diabetic, and I need to clean up my apartment lest I become homeless.

I also need to work on the Kiara documentation. I had a hard time learning Linux, and I'd like to see what I can do to make it easier for others. The Linux community is run by programmers, and that makes it awesome, but programmers seem to divide users into two camps:"programmers" and "idiots". There's a whole world of possibility between click click click clicking for hours and hours and debating python vs. perl. It's my ambition to create a place for educating users to be empowered. And Kiara is is something I can build that

To summarize, Kiara has three missions other than, you know, being a Linux distro:

1. To preserve the classic KDE 3 desktop

2. To provide a showcase for demonstrating a more advanced version of Fluxbox than the usual default, with the help of Konqueror.

3. As an opportunity to help the Linux Newbie become the Linux power user.

For the time being, as I concentrate on pulling my life out of the crapper (it's a metaphor), and work on Kiara documentation, it looks like Kiara releases are going to follow releases of Firefox, and so, a couple of days after the release of Firefox 3.5.6, here is Kiara 09. It's stripped down, it's got Firefox 3.5.6 instead of Firefox 3.5.5. Other than that, it's not much different.

I've been laying low, and I'm going to continue to lay low. Sometime, in early 2010, With the help of God and St. Ignutius, I intend to start working on overhauling this site to accomodate these three objectives. In the meantime I'll keep up with basic software updates. Kiara is a customized version of Slax, and you can find a lot of the information you need at Slax. org, and if I can help anyone who is using Kiara (about 100 downloads so far, and only 5 or 6 of them are me) I can be reached through Twitter (@GNULinuxMadman) or by email (kiaragnulinux@gmail.com).

By the way, I might as well let you in on the joke. Kiara 09 is listed as a "Unstable release Well, I think they're all going to be unstable, unless this whole operation chages significantly. At no point am i going to say: Sure go ahead and ruyn your business on my homemade CD.

The desktop is really really gray. That's to show you how much I've been getting into the Christmas spirit. Actually, I love this art, from vladstudio.

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