Porteus

I installed the 486 XCFE v3.1 version on a terribly sluggish old Dell Latitude D800. The performance is surprisingly good for a PC that basically would no longer respond. Here are my problems -
There is a 40GB hard drive. It has a desktop icon ("39 MB)", that's fine.
But I also have a 511MB volume on the desktop ... why do I have this?
After hard drive installation I was prompted to install Firefox. Great! But it is revision 31 and it reports that it's up to date. Why won't it update?
I downloaded a tar of the newest Linux version but there is no installer for it.
In these forums, I was instructed to log in as root and execute usm -u all
When I do this I get a cascade of error messages saying not enough space.
I also tried following instructions at mozilla to unpack the tar and gain, I get a cascade of errors saying not enough space.
It seems that the outputs are going to the 511 MB drive. Why?
So I followed the same instructions from mozilla and carefull directed everything to the corresponding full hard drive directories.
The result? Firefox would no longer execute. I had to reinstall Porteus.
In summary:
Why is there a 511MB drive on my desktop?
Why are my files going to the 511MB drive and blowing up for lack of space? How do I get rid of it?
Why did Porteus offer to install a version of FireFox that cannot be updated?
What is the simplest way to get a new version of FireFox installed?
I will also mention that the download link on the Porteous website was broken.
Eventually I found my way to vim dot org through a Google search.
I

lintode wrote: ↑

21 Apr 2022, 17:34

I installed the 486 XCFE v3.1 version

Interesting. Why did you choose such an old release?

lintode wrote: ↑

21 Apr 2022, 17:34

But I also have a 511MB volume on the desktop ... why do I have this?

What files/folders are on the volume? Any named UEFI?

lintode wrote: ↑

21 Apr 2022, 17:34

I will also mention that the download link on the Porteous website was broken.
Eventually I found my way to vim dot org through a Google search.

You didn't see the links mentioned here? Announcements and Porteus-v4.0 is released! ?

It's almost like you're copying an old posting lintode.

This D800 is so strapped for resources that I didn't want anything "new"
The download link on the website was not working. I found a download site at VIM without explanations. I can certainly try a newer release but that doesn't explain why any release would download anew, an old version of Firefox ESR.
The 511MB volume had its own set of all of the standard system directories and it was using them instead of the 39GB disk.
If I had been able to follow the download link I am sure that I would have picked a better release.
Sorry if my being a newbie and asking newbie questions is uninteresting to you.
I am moving on to try some other distros.

lintode wrote: ↑

22 Apr 2022, 01:41

The 511MB volume had its own set of all of the standard system directories and it was using them instead of the 39GB disk.

Before you added Porteus to the 511MB volume did it have a UEFI folder on it?

lintode wrote: ↑

22 Apr 2022, 01:41

Sorry if my being a newbie and asking newbie questions is uninteresting to you.

I don't recall saying that. In fact my 1st word to you was "interesting".

If you find a distro you like better than Porteus 3.1, which was released in 2014, please stop back and tell us which one it is.