Porteus

Porteus includes many useful tools:

mp3 player: mpg123 and mpg321
CD ripper: cdparanoia
Ghostscript e.g. concatenating, merging, splitting, extracting pages from PDF files: gs
and more ... ffmpeg ffplay

Are there more?
You can't use what you don't know!

I like to go through the /bin and /sbin folders and click away! Sometimes I open a terminal and copy/paste/execute the file name just to see what happens. It's fun.

Vic

Cool! I think it's cdparanoia that allows you to drag and drop audio tracks from CDs (red book), which is super handy. AFAIK, that's not possible on Windows.

Many of these binaries are used in the background by main applications, like mpv/celluloid or pdf viewer.

One tool there I like very much is youtube-dl

In Porteus also included the "primordial rocks"
vi and mc
Does anyone else use this??

I use VI all the time. And major kudos to the dev team for using Busybox 1.35 (latest) for initrd and some of the others like vi. Enough improvements to vi have been made that I think for most people it will suffice, unless you are a super heavy user that needs things like vim..

I don't use MC so much for a file-manager, but on occasion use the sister utility of mcedit for non-modal editing when I forget some vi commands. Since mc / mcedit is already a part of Porteus, it relieves me from finding another non-modal editor like nano, which I don't use much either. Very handy like the old dos editor with the F9 pulldowns.

And of course Lynx browser built-in which calls up our faqs. I don't use it much for online web-browsing, but do use it often for browsing local and remote filesystems text files and so forth. AND, if you use the (F)ull menu with it, you'll have a small selection of file management utils - one of which I use often is changing permissions. Reminds me - I should probably set my editor in Lynx to mcedit for those quick edits...

For lurkers, to start browsing in your current directory, just tell Lynx to look inwards with nothing but a dot to aim it at your current directory. Use arrow keys to move into and out of directories...
I love these little classic tools. Heck, I learned vi on "Elvis", when in it's last incarnation it had the ability to not only edit text files, but handle html as well. Ah, good old days....

qpdf is also a very useful tool
Manual:
https://qpdf.readthedocs.io/en/stable/

Sometimes I forget about Porteus' own cli utils:

http://www.porteus.org/info/tips-and-tricks.html#12

I used mloop just yesterday, and see that a handy fromdos / todos already exists to handle those dos / unix end of line funk. I used to rely on my own compilation of busybox' unix2dos and dos2unix for that chore, but looks like Jay already has similar incorporated. Nice.

scanimage is also a very useful tool
Linux man page:
https://linux.die.net/man/1/scanimage

Some useful programs are missing, like rmlint.
https://rmlint.readthedocs.io/en/latest/tutorial.html

Currently getting into that (using rmlint_2.9.0-2.3_amd64.xzm that I made myself via ) It creates a sh script that you might want to tweak, like, in my case, I do not want it to delete broken symlinks. ( My current system has GLIBC_2.33 and the also available rmlint-2.10.1-6.fc35.x86_64 needs at least GLIBC_2.34 )

Like, I ran it on my main images collections, and it gave me approx 2 GB more space by creating symlinks. -bl # -bl -badlinks (ignore bad symlinks)
-g # Show a progressbar with sane defaults

But the issue, even when you call it like above, the resulting script would still delete all broken symlinks. Maybe I am just too stupid to understand how rmlint should be executed.

I needed to change the entries in e.g. the function handle_bad_symlink() {
from to so that it does no longer remove my broken symlinks.

The reason I want to keep is, at times I make out of a large image file, like a wallpaper PNG (these can be 10 MB or even 25 MB or larger) smaller files by using webp instead of png, probably also reducing the resolution.

But when I already symlinked the original png, then that symlink will be broken when I deleted piratewreck.png after I created piratewreck.webp …

The reason I do not want the broken symlinks to be removed is, if I do so, then I would no longer have a reminder that certain symlinks did exist.

You can easily find broken symlinks via Then I can create a new symlink to piratewreck.webp and delete the original (broken) piratewreck.png symlink.

Kulle wrote: ↑

10 Feb 2022, 08:33

In Porteus also included the "primordial rocks"
vi and mc
Does anyone else use this??

I use vi occasionally and mc daily.