New to Porteus but not to Linux

[Tuxmarc]

Hi !
I am Marc, 62 yo, retired, living in France.
With the same pseudo I am also on Ubuntu, Mandriva, Mageia and Linux Questions forums.
I have been looking for a special thread like "introduction", but there is none, so let's go.

The existence of Porteus has been revealed by a Belgian friend who is very enthusiastic although he barely understand English, but for the first time, he really loves a 100% non-French distribution.
So I have downloaded the .iso and when I ran the livecd and looked inside menus, golly ! incredible so much good stuff in only 250 mb
Before finding Porteus, I have been falling in love with Linux after reading a book written by an Italian scientist revealing he ugly side of M...$..t the bright side of Linux and then I started buying magazines, downloading, more than 100 distros, everything, .rpm like Open Suse, Mandrake (now Mandriva), Mageia, Fedora, PcLinux OS, .deb like Debian, Ubuntus (since 2005) and derived distros, big ones and small if not tiny ones like Puppy, DSL, Slitaz.
I even tried Gentoo and Sabayon, Open Solaris, tried to tame BSD, and did not forget Slackware.
Having worked with Slackware, I was a bit afraid to have to compile new soft, but I have seen that it is not so difficult with Porteus.
Having an old and faithful CRT, I had to fight to have it to accept 1024x768, I don't know how I did, but not Porteus is opening with the resolution I want.
The keyboard is still refusing to cooperate.
Although I tried to tune it for French azerty, it is stubbornly starting with US qwerty, is a package missing ?
Anyway i can survive by clicking on the flag
My Porteus is running on a small server fitted with an Intel proc at 2.66 ghz, 1 gb of RAM.
The computer is a gift of one of my brothers who saved some poor "old" PCs from the dust bin at his work !
The first installation of Porteus was on the same disk as Mandriva and Mandriva was "wiped". The apprentice had stricken again
At this stage I have seen big differences in /boot folder, and I have switched to an independent disk for Porteus and re-install Mandriva.
I have seen topics about multiboot with Porteus, but now I am keeping it on one disk, seems a big hard for me.
Now I have many, many good things to discover and I thank the developers for their excellent work !!!
Kind regards.
Marc

[francois]

Welcome, bienvenue to Porteus.

[slaxeee]

Hi Marc,

Welcome to Porteus forum community !

I'm french too and when i started with Porteus, i encountered the same difficulty with this damned french keyboard.

I remastered two xzm modules for terminal and TDE french localization.
You can download them and see if they can resolve your problems.

099-french.xzm : http://www.datafilehost.com/download-3f295c21.html ( put it in your base directory )
locales-fr_FR-utf8-i486.xzm http://www.datafilehost.com/download-e83c5c5f.html (put it in your modules directory )

Enjoy !

[wread]

Welcome an board, Marc!

I am not french, but I am the oldest member of the Porteus community (75), I don't say it too loud.......
I had in my office a Linux server Slackware 1.0 from last century working until 2009. Made of an old 486 box, loaded Slackware with 5" diskettes (there were no CDs yet), with a samba server to connect the collaborators to a common "hard disk".

Porteus is the best system ever made, and the guys in charge are nice, polite and able to bring Porteus to the top of all distributions, for knowledge is power as you already know.

Regards,

William

[francois]

Keyboard solutions possible solutions:

1) What bootloader do you use?
If you use grub legacy, in the menu.lst instructions you could resort to kmap=fr to boot with the french keyboard.

2) Did you install a save.dat file in which you could save the content of your desktop after each session?
If you did so you could right click right on the us flag and use configure to move with the fr keyboard setting to the top. At next bootup you should bootup fr keyboard.

3) you can simply use a script:
setxkbymap=fr

Just put the file in /root/.kde3/Autostart

Effectively, you will really feel at home at the porteus forum. Very kind and competent people are there, except me of course

[Tuxmarc]

Thank you François, Wread, Slaxeee

I see I am not a lonely French speaking member, but it is so strange to chat with French members in English !

Wread, so you have known the dinosaur computers
My first real contact with computing was at work in the 70's.
Since the day I had heard the name "ordinateur" in French nicknamed in the 50's and 60's "cerveau électronique" (eletronic brain) I felt it should be a wonderful toy hum... tool.
But I was so bad in mathematics and so it was useless to think about working in computing ..... till the day when I could write a small program in Dbase, and then big ones.
My first real encounter with a computer was the IBM 4381 where I was allowed to run some applications. I remember commands in Vollie, which sprang from depths of my memory when discovering bash commands with Caldera Linux.
We have lived a real revolution in computing, I shall tell the story to my grandchildren !
My Belgian friend who discovered Porteus has still a running 486 !

I have already tested Slaxeee's tips.
Downloading was easy, but finding the right folder was tricky.
I am accustomed to the classic structure /bin, /boot, /dev, /etc and so on.
I had to rack up my brains to locate the right folder.
I tried the console with "su" to copy the modules to the folder but no luck.
So I have switched to root and could find at last the modules folder !
I think I have to activate the modules since the computer is insisting on QWERTY.
Yesterday we went out for shopping and I have to work again.

@François
To my great surprise, I could not find any menu.lst in my boot folder !!!!
I tried to repair my bootloader when Porteus has blacklisted Mandriva, so I cannot imagine which bootloader I have !
This is something I have to find in Porteus, its boots correctly, but how ?
Before Grub2, Grub1 had no secrets.
It was a real game to change options.
I tried on Grub2 to see that a kernel change was destroying my work

[slaxeee]

Hi Marc,

Reading your response, i realise that i wasn't so explicit ....
And maybe you are using the CD/ISO version and not the tar/usb one.

In this last case, upgrading your Porteus distribution is easy :

From linux( Porteus liveusb key for instance ) :

Put the 099-french.xzm module in /mnt/sd(x)/porteus/base directory
Put the locales-fr_FR-utf8-i486.xzm in /mnt/sd(x)/porteus/module directory

sd(x) is your liveusb key drive (b,c,d,...)

From Windows :

The same but with E:, F:, ... drive letters

If you start from CD/ISO version, you have to upgrade the distribution image of course !

I've completed the locales with applications translations modules (.mo files ) but it's not still fully completed.
Some applications are compiled for TDE and not KDE.

I hope this could help

NB: To talk in french, you can open a thread in the Other Languages section !

[Iapetus]

Have you guys tried using the Language Selection Tool, from inside the Porteus Settings Centre? I'm a native english/us keyboard user, but it seems like this tool should generate a module with all of these settings + locales for default applications.

Aside from Language Selection Tool, you could also set your keyboard mapping with the CLI tool, setxkbmap. This would give you some more flexibility than the "kmap=" cheatcode, as you can have multiple settings with multiple variants, e.g.:

Code: Select all

setxkbmap -layout fr,us -variant dvorak,mac

Would set a primary layout as french with dvorak variant, with a secondary setting (toggle back and forth by clicking on the flag icon) for 'us' with a macintosh variant.

[Hamza]

Welcome on Porteus !

[Tuxmarc]

Thank you for tips and welcome !

Eventually the language and keyboard problems have been solved
It took a certain time to understand that when I had located the lzm files I simply had to right click on one and look for the activate command !
After restart a part of menus were in French, for the rest, I don't mind.
After I had to find why I could not settle my keyboard.
In the settings menu, for the 50th time I could not understand why it was impossible to find the OK, apply, cancel buttons.
This comes from my video strangely in 1024x768 for applications, but not all of them, because the video settings seem to be 800x600 for other applications.
So I have used lapetus' medicine
After simply entering setxbmap -layout fr, it works
Thank you lapetus for having given the right command, since --help is not valid for setxbmap.
I had not spotted the foreign language section, but not it's all right.
Now I go on exploring !

[Hamza]

That should works better with this command:

Code: Select all

setxkbmap fr

[francois]

Hamza is right. Sorry for misleading you with my setkeymap command. I have corrected it in the post that I wrote above.

Concerning the issue of grub legacy or grub 2, if you would like like at some point to return to grub legacy there is the grubconfig utility:
http://forum.porteus.org/viewtopic.php? ... 7395#p7395

Grub legacy langage is spoken more fluently with the porteus os. To me, its seems more simple to access and to work with. But maybe this is only a question of familiarity. However, it should'nt do us much harm to talk more often in terms of grub 2.