Porteus

I'm a relative newbie to Linux and have not had much success with Slackware or Slackware-based distros because they require a lot more knowledge than I currently have. Porteus looked promising as it packages Slackware in a user-friendly shell. I downloaded V3.01 64 bit Mate and tried it as a LiveCD session. It looked good. As with any LiveCD session, many things are disabled because they can't persist past the session and you can't modify what is on the CD.

I installed it on an SD card. Booting from that, it didn't like the vfat format and had me create a save file. I couldn't get the save file to be used (required editing system files, and I'm not there yet). I reformatted the SD card to ext4 and tried again. Everything worked fine. Except, Porteus is still behaving like it is running a live session. Many key things are disabled or missing. For example, there doesn't appear to be a way to access, add, or maintain modules, at least from the tools that are supposed to be there according to the instructions. System-type utilities that I would expect to find aren't there. Even Firefox has certain customization disabled so, for example, I can't turn on the menus (that customization button doesn't work). It does save a few settings from the session (for example, the wifi password). Otherwise, the installed version is like trying to use a demo--what you see is what you get.

So my question: is Porteus behaving as it was designed to do (and the instructions are incorrect or out of date)? Is it Slackware-like in that getting it off the ground requires terminal work to build what you need? Or, am I seeing a problem? If so, is this something known and recognizable, for which there is a newbie-compatible fix?

Just an aside for the developers: Installing on a flash drive is a recommended implementation. Flash drives are almost universally vfat. The distro is designed to appeal to newbies. Why have everything involved with a standard installation automated and then require the user to manually edit a system file for it to work? It automatically finds and installs printers and sets up wifi with everything but the password. I haven't found any non-Slackware distro that can do that. Making a change for the save file or following a different boot path ought to be easy by comparison.

fixer1234 wrote:is Porteus behaving as it was designed to do

IMHO yes. But anyway francois will be able to fill you in better

Welcome fixer1234.

Being a 'lightweight OS' many components have been removed from the standard desktop. If you have formatted your install media as ext4 and successfully booted then your changes should now be saved. If they aren't then try rebooting again. You can test by changing the desktop wallpaper for example and then rebooting. Might I also suggest that you download the latest release candidate which may run a little smoother when it comes to adding extra stuff.

http://build.porteus.org/rc

Thanks for your feedback. We are working toward making the setup as user friendly as possible. Using a linux operating on a FAT file system has many limitations that are not so easy to remove in an automated way in Porteus. Feel free to ask/suggest when you run into any other troubles.

Thanks for the reply. My question had been prompted by things missing that were described on the web site, like a "dependency-resolving package manager". It looked like the fundamental tools for modifying anything were missing and in order to do anything useful with the installation it would require doing it through the terminal. I'll check out the RC.

My reference to automating turning on the save file was based on all of the pieces already being there. I didn't find the instructions for modifying the system file. However, I assume the instructions are somewhere. The requirements have already been solved, it's just a question of editing a file following those instructions. In general, that seems like something straightforward, possibly by branching between two pre-written paths. However, I'm not a programmer, so it is really easy for me to pontificate on what should be simple.

Edit: Downloaded the v3.1 RC. Much better. It includes the stuff that was missing.

Thanks for the feedback. Regarding the 'dependency-resolving package manager' you can start the GUI from the panel (blue box looking icon) or from a terminal with: usm -h

You will need to update the database in order to resolve dependencies across 5 slackware repositories.