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Kororaa live CD has Linux quivering
Tuesday March 14, 2006 (04:16 PM GMT)
By: Joe Barr

A new live CD from the Kororaa Project is making big waves in the Linux community, because it provides an easy way to see and use Xgl, the X server graphics technology that's the hottest thing to hit the Linux desktop since the blinking cursor. I took the live CD for a spin, and interviewed three members of the Kororaa project.

Novell released its contributions to Xgl to the open source community last month. It also announced that Xgl will be included in the SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop to be released this summer, and has provided instructions on how you can add it now to existing SUSE releases.

You can also add Xgl to other distributions of Linux, such as Gentoo and Ubuntu Dapper. But if you just want to see and experience Xgl for yourself, without risking your current system by going through a somewhat difficult installation process, there is only one place you can go: to the new live CD from Kororaa.

Kororaa lead developer Chris Smart learned of Xgl's availability at the end of February, then disappeared for a few days. When he emerged -- yes, Gentoo readers, that was for you -- he held in his hands a bright and shiny live CD, which he announced to the world at 3:34 a.m., EST, on the 8th of March.

Kororaa is a distro that provides a binary installer for Gentoo. Djpharoah, one of the Kororaa IRC and forum moderators, says using Kororaa allowed him to completely install and configure a Gentoo system in a couple of hours instead of a couple of days.

The response to the live CD has been so great that the ISO had to be removed from the Kororaa site and is available at present only from the list of mirrors you can find here. Articles on Groklaw and elsewhere have fanned the flames of interest even higher.

What's the big deal?

I downloaded a copy of the 442MB live CD ISO from a mirror site in Europe on Sunday, and booted into Kororaa without a clue as to what to expect. A nice, but sort of plain, desktop appeared with a cute penguin (a Korora, or fairy penguin, most likely), a couple of icons on the desktop, and not much else. As I moved around, opened windows, and exercised the graphics system just a bit, I could detect a certain snappiness to the openings and closings that isn't normally there.

The windows also seemed to have a translucence to them that ordinary windows don't have. But dragging a window from one part of the desktop to another really grabbed my attention: the window moved like it was made out of Jello. The corner I was pulling it by stretched out from the rest of the window, then everything followed. When I stopped the movement, it sort of snapped back into shape, quivering as it did so. Moving it up and down rapidly caused it to stretch and compact.