What do you use porteus for?

[rayyu]

just curious, though this has probably been asked before.

I know porteus was designed for portability but does anyone use it for other things besides a portable/backup os? Like a main OS or something. I'd imagine something like porteus is fairly versatile, what with the kiosk edition (which is a strange addiction, imho, or at least I've yet to see a distribution have that kind of niche edition alongside of the main ones )

so what do you guys use porteus for?

[Hamza]

Using it as main OS.

[Ahau]

I seem to be in the habit of using Porteus to make more Porteus Apart from that, I use mainly use it for surfing the web and sending email. I also used it to do some audio editing a few months back -- that was interesting because I have no idea how to do audio editing, but I managed to fight my way through it. Far easier (for me) than doing it in Windoze.

[brokenman]

Everything except graphic design. This is not the fault of Porteus, but rather my lack of knowledge using alternatives to the adobe suite.

[sean]

I have porteus on a half dozen thumb drives, LXDE, Xfce, and Mate, mostly configured as closely as each allows of the other. Hate to admit my shortcomings but I'm so afraid of losing something it is very hard to throw away (delete) old stuff. Consequently I seem to test everything new I try with Porteus on the first thumb drive I made which is actually 2.0rc2. All the rest are pure 2.0's which I try to duplicate accordingly.

Maybe it's my age, or lazyness, but mostly lack of knowledge and fear of the unknown that keeps me from stepping up to the plate and doing what "I believe" is what I want to do. I'd like to have Porteus as my main system installed on a hard drive, be able to mess with it, improve it, reconfigure it, do anything I want with it, and when I walk out the door, be able to simply copy everything to a USB thumb drive and "take my computer with me".

So, I just knew this topic was going to touch on that subject. I actually avoided looking at the topic until now. And bingo! There was Hamza and brokenman saying exactly what I was thinking. I remembered brokenman mentioning that he did his work on hard drive and then copied it to thumb drive as needed. That is as I remembered it anyway. And when I saw that Hamza used Porteus as his main OS, well, let's just say I felt my feelings were vindicated all around.

Fact of the matter is I keep plugging in my thumb drive and using it instead of my hard drive system(s). I really love the way Porteus behaves. More and more often I find myself shutting down with the thumb drive plugged in, then booting up the next day with it still in place.

Where I'm really lazy is with the boot managers, LILO, Grub, and Grub2. Man I do hate messing with these things. I messed with Grub a couple of times, and it wasn't too difficult to figure out, but Grub2, why are distro's using it when AFAIK it is still beta and Grub works fine. Well, okay, I know there are serious answers, and all way over my head, just a brief vent of steam from a frustrated old timer. But I do learn a bit more with each boot, always wanted to be more keyboard efficient and Porteus is helping me more than the past 8 years experience. I do love it so!

And I'm pretty windy, as you can tell it takes me forever to get to the point. So here we are, the point is I find it very encouraging that folks are using Porteus as their main OS and taking advantage of it's portability also. I will be making renewed efforts to install Porteus to the hard drive with boot privileges.

Any suggestion where I should post this question so others may also benefit from the answer:

I have copied Porteus from a USB thumb drive to a folder on my hard drive several times, a while back, and each time I got messages that some "special" files could not be copied. Is there a simple explanation for this message, hopefully that those files are temporarily generated?

Sean

[cttan]

Apart from usual Office stuff, emailing and surfing, I use my Porteus as my personal PBX by installing Asterisk in it.

[fanthom]

main OS on the laptop (magic folders set on /home/guest).
the only thing i'm missing is a possibility of editing doc/docx files. LO is still not 100% compatible so must use Windows for this task.

[golimar]

I have a work laptop from my company, and when I'm not at work I prefer to use Linux. I can't create a new partition for Linux so I was searching for Live Linux distros that I can put on my current NTFS partition. So far I only know Knoppix and Porteus that have cheatcodes like from= or bootfrom= that allow me to do this.
My typical usage is web browser and media player.

[rayyu]

*gasp*
fanthom uses porteus as his main os?
I kid, of course though not everyone dogfoods their own stuff

one thing that's stopping me from using porteus as my main...is steam haha. I probably won't be able to delete my windows parition for games but if/when steam on linux gains more traction, I'd like to support it. And afaik there's no steam for 64-bit porteus...and in any case, heavy gaming on a live/portable operating system seems a bit weird though for now I use it very often

porteus made me fall in love with KDE4, so that's what I'm using on a usb =) have been unsucessful in getting the razor-QT version on my netbook, but when I have time I'll ask around the ircs/chat about that

@golimar
puppy is very easy to use alongside windows, just download an executable file and follow the instructions. but imho porteus is more flexible and polished...plus you don't get the barking sounds

[surio]

@golimar,

Just wanted to say, your name has fantastic meaning within various parts of the Indian subcontinent.....

Just type "Golimar" "goli maro" etc... in your favourite search engine (it's duckDuckGo!) and you'll have tons of fun....

Out of interest, what does it mean to you, as a spaniard

Thanks.

[Hamza]

Offtopic.

[surio]

sorry @hamza,

The user had not set up PM options... and the coincidence was too good to miss, so I thought, one question might not hurt.

I'll delete it if you want

[rayyu]

as the topic starter, I don't mind

[golimar]

Ok, I'll set up PM for my account
I know about the golimar music video, and that's why I use this nick,,, but what does the word mean?

[Hamza]

This is going so far. Please stop the "off-topic".