Porteus

Hi Everyone,

I have recently tested Porteus 1.2 RC1 version and found out that it is no more able to read xzm modules that was re-compressed with gzip compression. It shows a message that the module is corrupted.
What I did was first extract the xz compressed module into a folder and then create a module out of that folder using the command: I used to do this for earlier versions of Porteus (1.0 & 1.1) and it had worked perfectly fine but now those modules cannot be activated in 1.2 version.
The reason I recompress the modules is that although gzip modules are little bigger in size but they give better performance than xz compressed modules. The speed difference is significant in low-end PCs. So, I feel that the gzip restriction should be taken off as in the earlier versions.

Thanks for the report. While i havn't done any serious testing with compression ratios .... i believe the xz compression to be superior. The more passes made during compression, the faster it will decompress. Using the latest Porteus Module Manager, you should be able to choose you compression.

I will have a look at adding the gzip support. Never thought about it really.

I ran across an interesting case this morning. I have written "slackbuilds" for a number of fonts, to automate the creation of txz packages (nothing is actually compiled, the script just extracts the tarball, zip or other archive and puts the files in the right directories). I then converted the txz packages into xzm modules and found that the xzm modules were actually larger than the txz's -- in one instance, nearly twice the size! I'm not really sure why this is the case, but I do wonder if a different compression algorithm would keep the size down for some packages.

This issue has been fixed in v1.2 Final. The gzip modules are working fine.

Thanks