New to Porteus - My observations
Posted: 15 Jul 2015, 10:36
Hi,
So I'm new to Porteus which I came across when searching for a new OS. To give a little background:
I have been a linux user for six years but I'm still a newbie. Everytime I think I have understood it I realise that there is so much more that I cannot do. I tried a number of distros to start with and settled on Puppy. My reasons for this are that Puppy usually worked on my then older systems (now retired) but importantly it was portable, ran off a USB stick,or ultimately could sit on a hard drive but be booted from either a USB stick, a CD or a floppy drive using the legacy GRUB bootloader. There was never any worry of upsetting the preinstalled Windows OS which the rest of the family are addicted to. Note this is still a prerequisite.
For the last four years I have happily used Saluki which I was involved in from it's starting point. In fact I use it 99% of the time and it still does what I need. So why look to change? Well Saluki hasn't been supported since 2012 so the browsers are getting out of date and I don't have the skills to recompile a new one. Hence looking and finding my way here.
I am yet to test Porteus but so far it ticks many of the boxes for me.
It's designed to live on a USB stick and not touch my windows system.
It's modular so shouldn't suffer from Savefile bloat which Puppies tend to unless you start getting applications to work outside of your savefile.
It's currently supported and active.
Before I start my concerns are:
Will it work?
How easy is it to get onto a bootable USB. It appears that I have to download an iso, burn that to a CD and then create a bootable USB. To a newbie that seems like a lot of steps, but not unusual. The only issue I have is that the machine I will test on does not have an optical drive (it's a netbook). With Saluki I can download the ISO, mount it and copy the necessary files onto the already prepared USB stick which has Legacy Grub already installed. I can then just add a new entry to the menu.lst file. Not sure I will be able to do this with Porteus?
I can't find a definitive list of packages included in the ISO download on the main site or the forum. That's offputting for a newbie.
Saluki uses XCFE which is another tick for Porteus because I'm already used to it. However, with four DEs to choose from it is not clear if some support packages that others do not?
Apologies for the long first post. I wanted to set out what I hope to achieve and can then use it to track how things turn out. I will download the ISO and burn to a CD tonight and see how I get on. At which point I will post a First Impressions report.
TTW
So I'm new to Porteus which I came across when searching for a new OS. To give a little background:
I have been a linux user for six years but I'm still a newbie. Everytime I think I have understood it I realise that there is so much more that I cannot do. I tried a number of distros to start with and settled on Puppy. My reasons for this are that Puppy usually worked on my then older systems (now retired) but importantly it was portable, ran off a USB stick,or ultimately could sit on a hard drive but be booted from either a USB stick, a CD or a floppy drive using the legacy GRUB bootloader. There was never any worry of upsetting the preinstalled Windows OS which the rest of the family are addicted to. Note this is still a prerequisite.
For the last four years I have happily used Saluki which I was involved in from it's starting point. In fact I use it 99% of the time and it still does what I need. So why look to change? Well Saluki hasn't been supported since 2012 so the browsers are getting out of date and I don't have the skills to recompile a new one. Hence looking and finding my way here.
I am yet to test Porteus but so far it ticks many of the boxes for me.
It's designed to live on a USB stick and not touch my windows system.
It's modular so shouldn't suffer from Savefile bloat which Puppies tend to unless you start getting applications to work outside of your savefile.
It's currently supported and active.
Before I start my concerns are:
Will it work?
How easy is it to get onto a bootable USB. It appears that I have to download an iso, burn that to a CD and then create a bootable USB. To a newbie that seems like a lot of steps, but not unusual. The only issue I have is that the machine I will test on does not have an optical drive (it's a netbook). With Saluki I can download the ISO, mount it and copy the necessary files onto the already prepared USB stick which has Legacy Grub already installed. I can then just add a new entry to the menu.lst file. Not sure I will be able to do this with Porteus?
I can't find a definitive list of packages included in the ISO download on the main site or the forum. That's offputting for a newbie.
Saluki uses XCFE which is another tick for Porteus because I'm already used to it. However, with four DEs to choose from it is not clear if some support packages that others do not?
Apologies for the long first post. I wanted to set out what I hope to achieve and can then use it to track how things turn out. I will download the ISO and burn to a CD tonight and see how I get on. At which point I will post a First Impressions report.
TTW