Porteus

The link is not good.

I wonder if we are really ready to welcome an avalanche of manjaro users.

francois wrote:The link is not good.

The link is ok, check again

francois wrote:I wonder if we are really ready to welcome an avalanche of manjaro users.

funny

a copy of the message: https://forum.manjaro.org/t/porteus-nem ... ution/3659

Hallo everyone, especially because of the clear "start up" nature of the new forum, I would like to inform the community about a Manjaro openRC based project called "Nemesis". It has been started as an alternative to the classic Slackware "Porteus Linux" distribution.
I am sure some of you already know its existence. I can assure you this is an interesting project with much of possible uses. The latest version is 3.5, and although in a testing phase, it seems pretty stable. It is fully updatable through manjaro repositories, pacman is there, and a special wrapper "pman" creates aufs union modules, a read only format for package installation persistence.

This is a so called "frugal" installation distribution, this means it is based on aufs union packages and can have full persistence on image file containers (dd command) or on real linux partitions. It can express its magic when installed/copied to flash USB media, SD cards etc. Very easy for a first time trial run, with a tool to create bootable media for MS windows and Linux. I suggest to try the LXDE version, but an openbox only desktop is possible with small modifications.
It can be easily customized the "manjaro way" [except kernel and kernel hardware based drivers...], but it has a pretty straight foreword how to for a kernel compilation, even nvidia drivers installation is possible with instructions on the forum. As far as I can test it, I can use AUR... and it responds to most of manjaro/arch documentation.

As a new project it has its drawbacks, bugs and it is open to ideas, that is why it needs testing support and its future could depend on this.
If you could find a good use of it I encourage you to try it, and decide what you would like to do with it. There is a well written documentation for the classic "Porteus" version, but you could use most of its contents for the Manjaro based "Nemesis" also.

If there is not much of interest it could be abandoned. So you could give it a chance... And who knows, you might like it. It's OpenRC too...
Good Luck on the new forum.

Nemesis Arch based Porteus

I finally got it. Maybe I read in diagonal, only the first paragraph.

You really have a good pen. Jay alias brokenman, would be delighted to read your your ecstatic review.

I have installed xfce4 and lxqt desktop environments from official repositories, both selectable in the lxdm login screen, both working ok. I suppose kde will work ok also when installed. Just edit lxdm config as stated before, the menu for KDE/openbox is there.

Switched browser to palemoon.
Note: there has to be a browser to the iso version, the first pacman setup and a manual browser installation will confuse some first time users

Ater some updates, I do not know whitch one, xzm mime type file disappeared, I mean the icon & menu for xzm activation/deactivation has been lost.
There have been some other issues like this one, about mime type dissapearence, maybe using a broken xzm or an update that overlays existing mime types (file manager / desktop environement package?). But now I think this is the only one lost.

I have also tried to use some menu configuration software for openbox standalone, this one uses only a predefined menu with non existent link entries.

About "pman" pacman wrapper

If the package has not been downloaded to pacman cache directory, then pman creates the xzm file ok.
If it is in cache, then it just installs/reinstalls as normal pacman, not creating the xzm in tmp directory.

I would like to see the function working even if the packages are allready in cache,
installed or not, at least for the basic "pman -S" installation command.

For now I try to keep xzm files at minimum use decause there could be conflicts if much of those created in a daily use installation. But I often create packages with "pman" for some special purpose portable alternative copies/backups, e.g. just a portale browser, a portable xfce4, qt5-base and small programs like htop etc. so I will not have to install them again .

edit: I ve just seen this, there is the arc2xzm command that will do this for individual installed packages with dependencies.
So if someone wants a full package bundle xzm (like e.g. a fully working xfce) could start a fresh/nosavefile session and create xzm and xzm bundles from there.

Thanks for the write up. When time permits I will continue the project.

brokenman wrote:Thanks for the write up. When time permits I will continue the project.

Nice project brokenman (fast, simple, minimal, portable, arch), keep it up...

There are some packages (individual files) that seem somehow locked to updates:
I have discovered those:
this file prevents all updates (mentioned in previous post)
an other one found trying to install a package from AUR
again delete conflicting files and update:
I do not know why those appear as "locked" conflicting files.

@istinnjazz:

How about you writing a HOWTO on building xfce environement from lxde iso including updating the keys and modifying lxdm?

I will test proof con gusto.

I' ve Lost mime type "xzm" commands and icon for modules

After some updates (probably theming stuff), I no longer can use right click "activate/deactivate" commands on modules and the icon disappeared
I 've read some arch docs but I cannot find what files to edit/config! neither can find a package that could configure it

francois wrote:How about you writing a HOWTO on building xfce environement from lxde iso including updating the keys and modifying lxdm?

this could be done, i will copy / paste and refine some posts from this topic

francois wrote:a HOWTO on building xfce environement

http://forum.porteus.org/viewtopic.php?f=138&t=5954

CAUTION
A Potentially dangerous bug

The bug described again here: http://forum.porteus.org/viewtopic.php? ... 225#p45543
there is more info on this... as this bug appeared again.
On a fat32 USB with image file container for changes file, this leads to a potentially corrupted software and a dirty fat32 partition.

Now I had an update manager session with 2 packages to be installed, this update fully filled the remaining space of the container (only about 100MB left), without a notification. So zero bites left, 1 package succeeded, the second has been stopped with an error. Then I had a restart.

This might be an issue to the "disk image" file, preventing system from a successful changes file save at shutdown. So there might have been a partial save and this lead to corrupted files.
Some side effects after restarting with 0 bites left on save changes device:
Pcmanfm lost its settings and had reset all its configuration.
Palemoon presented an error about "read only profile" and prevented https pages from loading. There could be more. So I have reverted from a backup, again.
Those software got corrupted was open during the error and during shut down. At my first post, there was an updated package corruption.

Tested only on fat32 changes file, fat32 partition got checked by windows check disk that found and fixed problems again.
There has to be an alternative way of preventing the zero bite issue, or at least a notification message. so then user could be prompt to expand the file size of the container and processed again with the failed command. If there is no left space on drive, then the corruption will probably happen.

So I would say that if changes file will reach its full space, there might be a linux system corruption of the current open software and the files being edited this time. Then there will be a fat32 partition size mismatch that can be fixed by only by check disk.

Reminder: This seems a serious bug, maybe you could reproduce it, and it might exist on slackware version also.

The only workaround is to check that space left on container will meet your needs before any update. For example a full update to current from 3.5 will probably need 2-3GB of free space, if you will not have it you will end up to this bug.

I suppose this would never happen this way if a native linux partition has been used, maybe only an unsuccessful update.

This happens on other Porteus 3.x versions also. And a solution is to keep backups of the save.dat file. When it gets corrupted do a restore.