newKai is the successor to a project I called Kairo. Kairo was my first attempt at building my own Arch ISO. Kairo used Arco’s base. newKai was created because I quickly realized Kairo was not truly a custom Arch ISO. Since it used a lot of Arco’s stuff it was really just a custom Arco ISO. newKai was created to remedy this.

As development on newKai moved forward a few core ideals were realized.

  • Stay as light as possible
  • Replace Calamares
  • Provide out of the box support for my 2011 Macbook Pro
  • Create a live USB environment (newKaiso)

newKaiso is the live USB portion of newKai. newKaiso was designed to be a fully functioning system that could be used every day without needing to be installed onto physical hardware. It also came bundled with everything needed to install newKai to a physical system.

newKai only comes with exactly what is needed to boot and install to physical hardware. This presented a few issues for me at first. The biggest and most annoying one was that due to Apple using a proprietary net card, there wasn’t an out of the box solution for working ethernet and wifi. I tried several drivers and none of them worked. Ultimately I had to modify a b83 driver and several other system functions like the order that drivers and modules came online during boot as well as blacklisting (and unblacklisting) certain modules. This was a problem that was not properly documented online and something that affects nearly every Macbook using the same family of network controllers. I fixed it and simplified everything like DHCP and more. It also was very security focused.

Calamares was replaced with two scripts I wrote. They work in unison as a CLI installer. It is used today in ValenOS and ValenSE.

newKai was ultimately abandoned because after finally learning everything I needed to properly setup Arch from scratch and then automate it, the time to theme newKai arrived. This is where I lost motivation. The motivation for newKai was to build an OS that used only my stuff. When the time came to decide what it looked like I could not make up my mind on what WM or desktop to use. This led to newKai being split into two versions: KDE and DWM. Ricing just really isnt my fancy and after finishing the DWM rice I decided I didn’t want to do this anymore let alone maintain it. Around this time I became an official member of XeroLinux and decided to just help Xero be the best it could be.