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Installing Porteus on Olivia Mint Disk

Posted: 16 Mar 2016, 19:28
by jimwg
Very sweet and simple please. I've gleaned viewtopic.php?f=39&t=1576 and others. I want to replace slow sluggish Olivia Mint on a 760gigRAM Thinkpad R31 with a trimmer swifter OS, and since I'm more familiar with Porteus than doing trial and errors with Slax and Xubuntu, etc. I want to "hard" install Porteus on the hard drive "alongside" Olivia to check Porteus out till I find a way to delete Olivia (for lots more space) and leave the Home directory intact. What is the better (what's the advantage?) route; "frugal install" or just installing Porteus on the HD the regular flash way? Is there a simpler way to execute the frugal install than all the command lines on the mentioned links? Another major issue is that the R31 is restricted to using RealTek wifi dongles which were almost impossible and long to set-up on Mint. Has anyone experience with them under Porteus?

Thanks for any guides!

Jim in NYC

Re: Installing Porteus on Olivia Mint Disk

Posted: 17 Mar 2016, 00:58
by francois
1.0 Use your porteus usb install and start porteus.
2.0 Create a partition of 40 gig ext4 to provide a porteus frugal install with gparted on your hdd.
3.0 Copy-paste /boot and /porteus and /kde folders on that new partition.

The remaining is an example where porteus is installed on sda5 (use blkid command to know which partition is which). You can change kde for your desktop of choice above and in the following, and login=root for guest, if you prefer.

4.0 Modify the /etc/grub.d/40_custom file in the Mint partition:

Code: Select all

#!/bin/sh
exec tail -n +3 $0
# This file provides an easy way to add custom menu entries.  Simply type the
# menu entries you want to add after this comment.  Be careful not to change
# the 'exec tail' line above.
menuentry "porteus on sda5 KDE" {
set root=(hd0,5)
linux /boot/syslinux/vmlinuz from=/dev/sda5 changes=EXIT:/kde   login=root
initrd /boot/syslinux/initrd.xz
}
5.0 Then you remove your porteus usb key boot into mint. Then from there in a terminal:
sudo update-grub.

At next reboot you should have porteus as a second distribution of choice in addition to mint.

For more info on grub2, see:
viewtopic.php?f=48&t=1790
You can modify the grub menu entry to boot automatically porteus.

Re: Installing Porteus on Olivia Mint Disk

Posted: 17 Mar 2016, 01:15
by brokenman
I would say create a folder on the hard drive next to mint called 'myporteus' and inside it put the contents of the Porteus ISO. Then edit the existing boot loader that mint installs to point it to the porteus install. Without knowing which bootloader it uses I can't offer an solution as to what to put in the bootloader to get Porteus to boot.

Re: Installing Porteus on Olivia Mint Disk

Posted: 17 Mar 2016, 01:27
by francois
Mint comes with grub2:
http://unix.stackexchange.com/questions ... d-i-choose
Search word grub.