Porteus

Hello again

AFAIK Porteus is the only distro that I have seen in my shot linux life, that bears the feature of booting with 2 de: KDE and LXDE

1) How this is possible?

2) What is the reason?

3) Are you gonna split porteus in 2 mainstream versions (LXDE and KDE) in the future?

thanks

How this is possible?

/boot/porteus.cfg contains specific string (lxde in this case) which tells rc.4 booting script to launch lxdm display manager. if that string is missing then kdm is launched. display manager moves you into specific desktop then.

What is the reason?

003-lxde.xzm module is 2.5MB only so it's no harm at all to add it to the ISO.
while KDE-4 is my preferred desktop for all daily task i'm using LXDE in case when i need to check something on internet, do something in terminal, etc...
lxde starts much faster than kde-4, it's much lighter (fits better older PC's) but has less features than KDE-4.

Are you gonna split porteus in 2 mainstream versions (LXDE and KDE) in the future?

rather not as we are short of maintainers.

@niculinux

There is also the XFCe for Porteus maintainers, and due to the last post in the thread, XFCe is now an official desktop for Porteus http://porteus.org/forum/viewtopic.php? ... 8066#p8066

For now, the 1.2rc1 is tested as the normal one (not downloaded both, I do it as i type)
I presume the normal one is KDE and LXDE. The other one is named XFCe, could be this one has XFCe only, but also can be it has XFCe and also LXDE...

For now, the XFCE ISO's only contain the XFCE desktop environment. Some day if I get XFCE all polished up and I get bored of tinkering with it, maybe I'll try implementing something very light, like fluxbox+fbpanel or openbox+tint2, or something very heavy, like Gnome3. At present, I'm pretty far away from getting bored with XFCE, though I also think brokenman and fanthom might kick me out if I add a fifth DE to the mix

For what it's worth, one could easily drop the XFCE modules (0090 and 0091) from the XFCE ISO into the /porteus/modules folder of a standard Porteus install, and have all three DE's available from one installation. I have that on my flash drive presently, for testing purposes.

Ahau wrote:maybe I'll try implementing something very light, like fluxbox+fbpanel or openbox+tint2

Sounds nice. Who was the maintainer of the slim alternative to xorg? Or did that not worked in the end like it should have been?
Since that would be nice pairings, fluxbox+fbpanel or openbox+tint2 and that. (Sorry me currently not remembers the name of the replacement. )

@Rava, perhaps you're thinking of Xvesa, which I used in my "Porteus Superfly" project. That's the lightest X implementation I've seen. the SliTaz project also has a lightweight xorg implementation -- I think they run an older version. If I were to incorporate something else in the ISO, I don't think I'd go to Xvesa, because I'd already have a full Xorg server in the ISO for XFCE and Xvesa is...really not that pretty for everyday use. The refresh rate is quite slow and the screen resolution choices are much smaller and a bit more difficult to manage.

Ahau wrote:The refresh rate is quite slow and the screen resolution choices are much smaller and a bit more difficult to manage.

No one should conplain if it uses with CRT Screen