[Solved] New Porteus install behaving like LiveCD session
Posted: 31 Oct 2014, 20:23
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So my question: is Porteus behaving as it was designed to do (and the instructions are incorrect or out of date)?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.
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.