Porteus linux on the net or on the waves of the web

[Rava]

2) Slax vs porteus
https://pocketmags.com/us/linux-format- ... orteus-5-0

Most probably again due to my weird internet I could not access the 2nd link - and since it was not available on archive.org I manually saved it.
Here it is for it to stay:
https://web.archive.org/web/20220825212 ... orteus-5-0

[francois]

This last link that you report is working for me.
Thanks.

[nanZor]

Bummer - Porteus 5.0 gets a poor review on Distrowatch:

https://distrowatch.com/weekly.php?issu ... 19#porteus

At first I was kind of miffed, but I realized that one would have to play 30 questions with the reviewer to find out what *HE* did wrong.

I've had no problems with persistence as he states. The lowest common denominator is to use the savefile manager, create the file, and point Porteus to it by EDITING the porteus.cfg file. (Or manually direct it during boot by altering the append line). It shouldn't take the author a couple of weeks to not find this standard solution.

Other issues were brought up, that I've had no problems with, but in the end, I think the author just doesn't understand the raison d'etre that makes Porteus different from all the "burn the iso, and hit the app-store / package manager and load 'er up" mentality.

Just saying - I don't want the devs and other contributors to Porteus to feel down. Some just don't get it, and it isn't their cup of tea.

It's too bad the author didn't seem to take the time to ask for help or guidance from us here prior to posting the poor review.

[francois]

It is not the first time that distrowatch puts on a reviewer with that type of attitude towards porteus.

The general rating of users of porteus is 8.6/10 at the end of that purported official review. And only the seldom user comes with such a negative review of our distribution.

This Jeff Siegel did not even read these comments before or after testing porteus 5.0.This a poor job.

[fanthom]

Just 3 weeks ago DistroWatch wrote about "immutable operating systems" and they do not list Slax or Porteus in particular:
https://distrowatch.com/weekly.php?issue=20220829#qa

I may be mistaken but Slax was very first with this approach ... Its a shame it was not mentioned.


Porteus reviewer missed one point: Slax/Porteus can be installed on a FAT/NTFS formatted removable media. Do you know any other linux which can do this?
Persistence cannot be enabled out of the box because FAT/NTFS are not handling file permissions and ownership properly.

Why we want to run Porteus on a FAT filesystem? Because the system is portable and usually installed on the USB stick. USB device can be used for carrying other files (docs, PDFs, audio/video) which can be accessed under Windows/Unix/OSX, etc. You do not need two USB sticks: one with Porteus and other carrying other files - you just can use a single USB device for both use cases.

Also - I do not like persistence at all. I prefer to keep everything in a read-only modules and have a full control over 'every single file' which is present the system.
This is a geek-ish way of using an OS and I understand its not suitable for everybody.
(to be honest Porteus with its modular and layered approach was never easy to understand for the newcomers)

Thanks

[Rava]

Why we want to run Porteus on a FAT filesystem? Because the system is portable and usually installed on the USB stick. USB device can be used for carrying other files (docs, PDFs, audio/video) which can be accessed under Windows/Unix/OSX, etc. You do not need two USB sticks: one with Porteus and other carrying other files - you just can use a single USB device for both use cases.

You can even add a 2nd partition to the USB thumbdrive, e.g. formatted as ext2.
Since the Windoze drivers are unable to see anything but the 1st partition on a USB thumbdrive that will never be bothered by Windoze. Even when you format the 2nd partition as VFAT (but why would you want to do that?) Windoze could not see it (Unless they changed that behaviour in Witless-10)
And when using UUID to address the rootcopy folder, you could let that point to the 2nd small partition of your USB thumbdrive.

The "unable too see it" is only valid for USB thumbdrives, not for external USB harddisks.

Added in 4 minutes 55 seconds:

Also - I do not like persistence at all. I prefer to keep everything in a read-only modules and have a full control over 'every single file' which is present the system.
This is a geek-ish way of using an OS and I understand its not suitable for everybody.

I fully agree, that is also my approach. When I set up new stuff and the system would crash prior me saving the new settings in e.g. my 992-rootcopy_5.0-RECENT.xzm module (which is a symlink to the most recent 992-rootcopy_5.0-YYYY-MM-DD.xzm module created by as script) then I would loose that recent changes, but that hardly ever happened. I cannot honestly recall that even happening even once.
(In the 3 years I moved away from the big city and now live in that small town we had a power failure only once - for approx 15 minutes.)

[nanZor]

Yep - no worries really. I think some misunderstand what the namesake of Porteus is about - as fanthom mentions.

Even AntiX's persistence options (root only, home only, root+home, static or dynamic for each!) can make a casual distro hopper reviewer scratch their head wondering which to choose and at which time.

I just wish the reviewer would have asked the community before writing. Oh well.

[francois]

I personally like persistence, but maybe more what should be called semi-persistence.

Some kind of basic installation tailored to my needs. Once it is at my taste, I make it a module that could be brought up each time persistence get corrupted. It seems to me there is less corruption of persistence memory since I boot porteus as an isol file. Could this be possible?

[Ed_P]

I like persistence also which is why I periodically make a backup copy of my save.dat file. And if I rename it as an .xzm file I can use it as a module.

I also run a script tailored to save my changes as a module.

[gnintilgyes]

Distrowatch reviewers... (snicker)
Oh well LOL I did a review about Solus and another about Void. Tried to do another but the stupid site didn't let me perhaps because they display one per day, the first one they get that day. I don't care about the real reason, I'm not reviewing anything there again.
Cannot take user's reviews too seriously because a lot of them are brief and the rating is just one or 10. Usually to just say something is kewl or it's trash, very easy to do in Internet these days.
Maybe the Slax dev got some heat because he switched base away from Slackware, although he recently came up with a branch of it based on Slackware v15? I did check out that ISO but figured it's not for me, Fluxbox doesn't let me change the screen brightness which is too much power and otherwise I'm afraid I can't do half as much with it as I could with Porteus.

https://distrowatch.com/weekly.php?issu ... #slackware
Almost forgot to mention: I didn't like Distrowatch "official's" review of Slackware, it's like he/she said too much. Just say it's the best of the "old" and the "new" worlds of Linux! Probably this was the same person who reviewed Garuda sometime later (ie. about two weeks ago) and said that the appearance tricks weren't to his/her preference.

Was going to post above this paragraph, but read the review about Porteus. This "official" is too comfortable with other distros LOL, wants to be fed with e-mail program? Needs Firefox?! (I shriek here.) I hate to say, I tried to do the same thing as him/her, but ended up formatting an external USB stick for GPT, with EFI partition, 8GB "ext4" for "porteus" directory and the rest as FAT32 and could live with that! What is so hard about that, rather than having nothing at all? No LOL wanted to do it like Slax. "The catch, of course, is that it's not clear how to build a module, ..." more evidence the reviewer was just fine on Fedora or Ubuntu or other distro, and very opinionated about Slackware and its descendants. I was not fooled by his/her saying anything about Puppy or EasyOS. I say he/she is afraid of the terminal, the complete opposite of Rava. "Or it is just the idea that the people who will use Porteus will figure it out for themselves?" the reviewer says at the end. I have, and I have just revealed what I did, and I'm not even a Linux intermediate user. Not offended by the review but LOL, only because the "official" couldn't successfully use persistance? Because his/her head hurt?

(In the 3 years I moved away from the big city and now live in that small town we had a power failure only once - for approx 15 minutes.)

You are very blessed indeed. Where I live, I just came from a 5-day power outage, before that having them every 1-1/2 to 2 months each one for at least eight hours and in Feb. and just recently "controlled" by cheap tropical storms. Paying the bills on time or not doesn't make a lot of difference.

[Rava]

I say he/she is afraid of the terminal, the complete opposite of Rava.

Then that reviewer should show me methods as efficient and low on memory and CPU usage to automatize ever-recurring tasks you need to do over and over. Sure, coding a script takes some time, and maybe debigging it tales also time. But once its finished the ever-recurring task is done in a mere second or seconds by the script - compared to the many minutes it would take when done with some GUI solution (click menu 1, open settings window 2, go to tab 3, input data 1 and 2, close window, go to menu 3, open window 3, insert data 3, go to tab 5, insert data 4 and so forth and so on - while a script would simply be

Code: Select all

whatever.sh data1 data2 data3 data4 [press enter]

Let's remember, girls and boys: In the beginning that was one of the grand ideas behind creating IT in the first place (letting it automatise long tedious calculations), and nowadays most people playing around most of the time when on a PC in what we in Germany call "Clicky Bunty" (or clicky buntie) - literally translated click-y (as mouse clicking) colour-y - referring to either the GUIs or folks that cannot handle the terminal and need a GUI for even the smallest of tasks.

Some insist using the terminal is outdated, but like I said: show me methods as efficient and low on memory and CPU usage to automatize ever-recurring tasks as the terminal.

Not offended by the review but LOL, only because the "official" couldn't successfully use persistance? Because his/her head hurt?

You are very blessed indeed. Where I live, I just came from a 5-day power outage, before that having them every 1-1/2 to 2 months each one for at least eight hours and in Feb. and just recently "controlled" by cheap tropical storms. Paying the bills on time or not doesn't make a lot of difference.

Well, we will see. With the energy prices going bonkers and European countries probably starting having much more issues with electricity net stability.
For the years past Germany was known to be the backbone of European electricity, stability and low outage wise, but who knows what this winter will bring, or how the next years will pan out. Also depends how long the awful Ukraine war will go on.

One detail is obvious: all reports by ex Russian soldiers that served in Ukraine have been that the weapons and other materiel and training was abysmal. One newspaper commented on that saying "autocrats do not care about the single soldier" and it's very true, incl. Russia. Even the most modern Russian tank (that costs quite some millions $ or €) are said to last on average 7 minutes in combat situations - and more often than not when the 7 minutes are up all the crew are dead. No wonder thousands of Russian males try to flee the country after the mobilization.

[gnintilgyes]

... and from there sure looked at the first prominently displayed image, "A timeline chart of how Linux distributions have forked": https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/ ... meline.svg

And sure, Porteus is also part of that timeline chart.

Incredibly EndeavourOS is not in that chart! Maybe it used to be called something else...
Also it incorrectly indicates a "SolusOS" as based on Debian which was discontinued. Solus is an independent distribution although it didn't begin by that name.
I learned something else today: Porteus Kiosk based on Gentoo? How is it like building it, because Distrowatch reviewers of Gentoo seem to like telling "horror stories" about it. Probably it isn't a lot different from Slackware giving the user a lot of control but which could be exhausting.
The Slackware family is much larger than I had thought, but too many dead members...

[Rava]

Incredibly EndeavourOS is not in that chart! Maybe it used to be called something else...
Also it incorrectly indicates a "SolusOS" as based on Debian which was discontinued. Solus is an independent distribution although it didn't begin by that name.

When you have reliable sources you can at least make a comment on wikipedia and suggest they add the correct info…

[francois]

In depth and very positive review for Porteus 5.0
https://medium.com/@fulalas/porteus-5-r ... df8789a758

[Ed_P]

He is an excellent writer. Porteus 5 review (Post by fulalas #91699)