Porteus

Hi, I was searching a while for a usb live distro with persistence for a machine with broken HDD that is not worth replacing.. and for carrying it with me ofcourse.

Found Slax, but new Slax 7.0 is released just a couple of days ago and I did not find a way to change the desktop environment. KDE is just too heavy for my machine and I dont like it very much. Coming from crunchbang linux, I was looking for an Openbox solution combined with the modular approach of slax..

Now I think I will settle with the XFCE version of Porteus, which I think is the most beautiful of all Porteus versions.. Lxde is mad fast, but I dont like the huge long menus in it. But the XFCE version seems to be perfect for my needs and is just beautifully designed out of the box!

Thanks for this very nice fork of Slax. Keep up the nice work!

Welcome to porteus and thanks for the kind words. I'm sure Ahau will be chuffed having another xfce fan.

I think xfce is great for users not too familiar with linux. this computer will serve its years to come as a shared media system in a social center and used by many people, so xfce is my natural choice. -- for myself, I prefer the beauty of openbox.

great to just have a mini usb key and any broken machine can be revived. it is an old hp compaq nc8000. from 2003 or 2004.

Welcome saneks! I'm glad you like it, and I hope you like version 2.0 even more

Brokenman, I think I am chuffed, but I can't say that I'm familiar with the term, so maybe I'm not?

To be honest, I have thought about adding an openbox option to the XFCE spin for those who want something lighter, but haven't really dug into it yet.

if you are interested in openbox, you should check out how it is implemented in crunchbang - very different from lxde, with no desktop icons, no auto-updating menu etc. but you are free to set it up just the way you want it to be. my favourite distro since 2009.

great to hear we can expect a 2.0 of porteus. is it a single developer or is a team involved (besides the forum community)?

I will be lurking around here and surely ask some questions in the days to come : )

is it a single developer or is a team involved (besides the forum community)?

"a team involved (besides the forum community)"

@Ahau, chuffed is happy.

@saneks, we are a highly trained crack force team. Except for me who generally hides in the shadows and sleeps when the boss is not looking, causes trouble and asks stupid questions. More like a slightly trained trained monkey.

@sanek or anybody interested... i have messed about with openbox in Porteus, and managed to get it working, both within lxde(in the sense of minimising the lxde elements) and on its own. It involves(mostly) adding/editing the xmls in ~/.config/openbox. I also made a couple of modules(feh,and openbox-menu, which i havnt got round to sharing )
I'm currently using archbang, which takes much from crunchbang.... so if somebody(Ahau) wants to make a complete openbox module, i might be able to help
Another aproach, is to configure kde4 in an openbox/keybind manner with tint2/conky and just pretend

oh yeah ..and you might be interested in Archpup http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=82494 ....it uses openbox....
havn't tried it myself(yet) and is very much in development so far( and requires some arch knowledge) and at 78mb is very minimal...