Porteus

As quite a few friendly guys over here have already helped me with my project of creating a Boot-Everywhere(TM) USB stick with P3.1 64 XFCE and VirtualBox 5.x and my complete Windows environment in a VM, here goes again.

I have tested the stick on a number of machines, some of Flintstone age, others more recent. P3.1 never failed to boot (OK, so it didn't boot on a very old Atom CPU netbook but that was to be expected as this is a 32-bit CPU), always went into XFCE and I could on all those machines run VirtualBox and my VMs. So far so good.

Now I have seen a few threads where people can't get P3.1 to boot or to switch into X. The question that now poses itself is this: How can I make sure (w/o having the respective hardware!) that P3.1 actually works on as great a number of machines as possible? After all, I do not want to sit in a Nepalese or Laotian internet cafe only to realise that my super stick doesn't boot!

I think this question of "total bootability" is of general interest and I would welcome a thorough discussion of the pitfalls and solutions.

Sooner or later you will meet this one PC where porteus doesn't boot.

e.g.
This Mobo (BIOSTAR N68PA-M2T) with the
nVidia Corporation C68 [GeForce 7050 PV / nForce 630a] (rev a2)
chipset doesn't boot because of the nouveau driver shipped with porteus 3.1.
solution:...you have to use the nvidia driver.
Is anyway always recommended if there is a nvidia graphic card / chipset.

--> "total bootability" <-- not possible..

The question that now poses itself is this: How can I make sure (w/o having the respective hardware!) that P3.1 actually works on as great a number of machines as possible?

The best chance will be to ensure the kernel is compiled with as many modules for diverse hardware as possible. Secondly you want to make sure there is as much firmware available as possible. Porteus tries to do this. In our testing ground (Nemesis porteus) the kernel and 001-kernel.xzm module, is a good 25M heavier but contains as much firmware as possible.

As Donald stated, total bootability ... not possible.

donald wrote:Sooner or later you will meet this one PC where porteus doesn't boot.
e.g.
This Mobo (BIOSTAR N68PA-M2T) with the
nVidia Corporation C68 [GeForce 7050 PV / nForce 630a] (rev a2)
chipset doesn't boot because of the nouveau driver shipped with porteus 3.1.
solution:...you have to use the nvidia driver.
Is anyway always recommended if there is a nvidia graphic card / chipset.

I may misunderstand your post but AFAICS you contradict yourself. On the one hand you say that Porteus won't boot on this hardware and then you go on to describe how to make it boot!

That is EXACTLY what I am after: a sort of informal "database" of hardware that DOESN'T run P out of the box but needs further drivers or other bits and describes those bits in sufficient detail to enable other people to get it to boot on that hardware. (Note the quotes around database, I am not talking about a literal database.)

donald wrote:--> "total bootability" <-- not possible..

brokenman wrote:As Donald stated, total bootability ... not possible.

Folks, did you notice the quotes "..." around the two words total bootability in my OP? I know that this is not achievable with reasonable effort. I just want, as I stated in my OP, to...

make sure (w/o having the respective hardware!) that P3.1 actually works on as great a number of machines as possible

That's all.

I may be a newcomer here, but why not just make a listing of the hardware that you have found it to work on. Then you can upload it with the request that others test it on their machines and return the results along with the hardware specs for any machine(s) that they tested it on?

That should let you know most of where it works so far.