Differences Between Porteus & Puppy Not In FAQ

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jimwg
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Differences Between Porteus & Puppy Not In FAQ

Post#1 by jimwg » 27 Feb 2014, 15:48

Just had a situation to define what differences there is between Porteus and Puppy to some new home schoolers seeking a OS to pack their flashes. Can there also be a comparison mention in the Porteus FAQ?

Thanks,

Jim in NYC

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Re: Differences Between Porteus & Puppy Not In FAQ

Post#2 by Ed_P » 27 Feb 2014, 19:58

hmmmm How many comparisons are in the FAQ describing the difference between Porteus and the 99 other distributions on DistroWatch (http://distrowatch.com/)? It wouldn't be fair to do it for one and not the others. IMO
Ed

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Re: Differences Between Porteus & Puppy Not In FAQ

Post#3 by wread » 03 Mar 2014, 02:09

To be able to make a comparison, one must know both distros good.

Maybe it is a task for yourself, why not?

:)
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Re: Differences Between Porteus & Puppy Not In FAQ

Post#4 by tome » 09 Mar 2014, 17:55

Differences:
Boot time - Porteus is much faster
guest account - Puppy has only root
another way for saving changes
another way for activating/extracting packages
Porteus has larger size but is more "Out of the box"
...
not tested but I think it's true
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Re: Differences Between Porteus & Puppy Not In FAQ

Post#5 by freestyler » 10 Mar 2014, 00:48

and the name porteus sounds tougher than puppy :)
https://www.porteus-apps.org

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Re: Differences Between Porteus & Puppy Not In FAQ

Post#6 by francois » 11 Mar 2014, 02:36

@jimwg: Why wouldn't you make a run on both distribution on some features that could be important to you and report? You could have a look at what has been written yet on each distribution on wikipedia as a starter. Then have a look at the available reviews available for each distribution on distrowatch, to continue. And then go thru a thorough roadtest of each distribution to come up with a nice comparative and objective review. 8)

There has been some discussion on puppy about porteus 2.1, see:
http://208.109.22.214/puppy/viewtopic.p ... ab6809a0a3

They might come out with a thread on 3.0, who knows. :wink:

According to a reviewer Jack M. Germain of Linuxinsider testing porteus 2.0:
http://www.linuxinsider.com/story/78550.html
I've gotten a lot of productivity value out of Puppy Linux and Knoppix Linux. As good as these two portable distros are, Porteus is more flexible.
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Re: Differences Between Porteus & Puppy Not In FAQ

Post#7 by dustbunnies » 11 Mar 2014, 08:26

Jim, from a recent article I had bookmarked:
source: http://www.dujingshan.tk/blog/porteusah ... nvironment
Feb 1, 2014 by Jingshan Du

Portable Linux is very useful when you want to carry a handy operating environment as well as your private data and settings along with you. There have been already some Linux distributions which focus on the portable mode, i.e. LiveCD/LiveDVD/LiveUSB. I have been using puppy Linux and one of its Chinese variant (called veket) on my USB stick for some years. They use squashfs (sfs) to store the file system. However, once compiled the sfs cannot be easily revised (or use the squashfs-tools to unpack & repack it). Puppy can "mount" additional sfs files to add software packages, whereas the main sfs file (usually contains everything from the kernel to the web browser) remains immutable unless there is a major upgrade. Also, you receive the distribution as a whole. If you want change something, for instance a different web browser, all your changes can only be saved into another file which must be loaded every time you enter the system and be written every time you leave. The whole system must also be completely loaded to RAM when boots up. These bring unnecessary time wastage in daily use.

Porteus (http://www.porteus.org) offers an opportunity to highly costomize your portable Linux environment. It is a portable-optimized distribution based on Slackware (more precisely, Slax). Indeed, Porteus appeared as a bleeding-edge remix of the Slax Linux. The whole system is divided into several modules (xzm files), which I guess are also squashfs. Additional packages are also installed as xzm modules in your existing file system. A major advantage of Porteus over other portable distributions like puppy is that you can choose whether to load all the modules in booting or just load them when needed. This remarkably reduces time required at booting up.

The system become very slim due to the highly modular design. Take the latest release for example (Desktop Edition 2.1 i486), the minimum size of the essential modules needed to a graphic desktop environment (lxde) is
13.4 MB (kernel) + 42.0 MB (core apps) + 34.9 MB (xorg) + 17.8 MB (lxde) = 108.1 MB.
You can also choose a more featured however bigger desktop environment by copying a different module into the porteus base directory. RazorQt, MATE, KDE, lxde and Xfce are currently available.

All the basic modules can be directly downloaded at http://dl.porteus.org/i486/current/modules/. For 64-bit systems replace i486 with x86_64. ISO images with different desktop environments can be downloaded at its parent directory.

Porteus can even help you build a customized ISO image online. Go to http://build.porteus.org/ and choose your options. For example, the user and root's password can be preset in this page. These factory settings are stored in a module as well. Porteus can also install/uninstall Slackware packages directly. It can also convert tgz/txz/rpm/deb packages to xzm as new modules to mount.

You can save your session in Porteus as well. You can save changes on your existing Linux file system, or into a .dat file on FAT/NTFS, or even use the Magic Folders function to synchronize changes between the live system and a actual folder on your existing system.
Dear Longtimers:
If any details within the quoted passage are incorrect, please post to enlighten us.
FWIW, this "vs" topic is especially poignant b/c Barry Kauler recently "announced his retirement".
Quite a few puppy users are now exploring, investigating, considering potential alternative distros.

edited to add:
here's late 2013 discussion in which we can observe puppy users' impressions of porteus 2.1:
http://murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=87940

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