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

[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)

[francois]

I am unable to post the following review of porteus on distrowatch review section:
https://distrowatch.com/dwres.php

You want a real review with pros and cons on porteus 5.0, there is the one written by fulalas :
Porteus 5 review — A different and powerful Linux distro
https://medium.com/@fulalas/porteus-5-r ... df8789a758

You have to take into account the efforts to keep the size of this distribution as small as possible, that is 350 MB average depending on the desktop choosen. And you can change the desktop at a snap of the fingers. Google-chrome stable on porteus has 103 MB. This is the reason why no browser is provided stock, it would increase the distribution size by 50%. Within a few click you get the browser of your choice, there is nothing wrong there.

Concerning persistence, the feature is easy to implement when you are a little familiar using porteus. Installing modules is very easy. On porteus 5.0, these are fetched or built thru very simple package wrappers called getmod and pmod and dumped into the /tmp folder. From there you just have to move them to the /porteus/modules folder or /porteus/optional folder

When talking about porteus, you have to choose your words and know what you are talking about. There is surely a learning curve to climb, but satisfaction will surely take place once you get to know that peculiar variant of Slackware.

Please use it for some time before issuing any unsupported negative comments. Porteus is like a super sport motorcycle, it is ultra perfomant in terms of speed and tweaking possibilities, it has nothing to do with a payloader which is heavy but will do a lot, but surely not as fast. A porteus installation is difficult to break and very easy to reset at its previous state.

If you have any difficulty with some functionalities of the distribution, though this is a very small community, they are accessible, friendly and helpful.

Any suggestion?

[Ed_P]

I am unable to post the following review of porteus on distrowatch review section:
https://distrowatch.com/dwres.php

Why?

Added in 25 minutes 46 seconds:

Any suggestion?

Since you asked.

If you want a real review with pros and cons of Porteus 5.0, here is one written by fulalas :
Porteus 5 review — A different and powerful Linux distro
https://medium.com/@fulalas/porteus-5-r ... df8789a758

You have to take into consideration the efforts to keep the size of this distribution as small as possible, which is about 360 MB depending on the desktop you choose and you can change the desktop at a snap of the fingers.

Google-chrome stable on porteus is 103 MB. This is the reason why no browser is included in the stock ISOs, it would increase the distribution size by 50%. Once booted within a few clicks you can get the browser of your choice to be added, there is nothing wrong there.

Concerning persistence, there is a feature that is easy to implement once you are a little familiar using Porteus. Installing modules is very easy too. With Porteus 5.0, these are fetched or built thru very simple package wrappers called getmod and pmod and written into the /tmp folder. From there you move them to the /porteus/modules folder or /porteus/optional folder

When talking about Porteus, you should choose your words and know what you are talking about. There is a bit of a learning curve to climb depending on where you are coming from, but satisfaction will surely take place once you get to know this peculiar variant of Slackware.

Please use it for some time before issuing any negative comments. Porteus is like a super sport motorcycle, it is ultra perfomant in terms of speed and tweaking possibilities, it has nothing to do with a payloader which is heavy but will do a lot, but surely not as fast. A Porteus installation is difficult to break and very easy to reset at its previous state.

If you have any difficulty with some functionalities of the distribution, the forum is a very small community, but very accessible, friendly and helpful.

[francois]

Since you asked.

And so what? You add nothing.

[Rava]

I am unable to post the following review of porteus on distrowatch review section:
https://distrowatch.com/dwres.php

Any suggestion?

I presume you already did the usual?

* Tried at least some different based browsers (e.g. not Firefox and Palemoon, since both are Firefox based, more Like: Try Firefox and Chromium)
* Log out of DW, delete the distrowatch.com cookies, log in again. I presume one must be somehow registered with DW to post there?

[Ed_P]

And so what? You add nothing.

Just better wording/phrasing imo. The story is your's not mine.