Where are the modules ?

[yggdrasill]

Hello everybody!

I am a complete beginner in terms of Linux and Porteus, so I apologize in advance for my stupid questions and for the wealth of questions...
I am not a complete beginner as I installed Linux Mint 15 Mate on my home laptop. But I didn't have to get my hands dirty, everything went just fine with all the programs I need.

But at work, my Win7 computer in my classroom is so restricted, that I can't do all the things I need to do. When I came across Puppy Precise, I thought all my problems were solved: I could boot my work computer from USB and have my own computer. But for some strange reasons, Puppy Precise does not work well on this computer (4GB RAM, dual core 1,8GHZ computer), then I came across Slax7 and now Porteus, which I can't really tell apart yet, I'm sorry.
But my problem is that I need 4 programs to do my work in class and in Puppy and Linux Mint they installed right away, but in Slax/Porteus, they seem impossible to get installed/working (I am still very confused about the difference between installing a package and a module, although I spent literally hours on end browsing through the forums and the tutorials.
So what I need are these four:
wine (to run my school/class administration software which only exists as .exe)
osmo 0.2.10 or 12
notecase 1.9.8 or the pro version if necessary
Kingsoft Office (at wps-community.org one can download a .rpm file, a .deb file and a tar.xz file, whatever this one is...) (I really am not able to get productive with LibreOffice Writer, and especially with LibreOffice Impress and I want to get rid of everything MS related, so no MSOffice in wine)

I went for Porteus 2.1 XFCE and at boot, it told me that as my USB is fat, I had to do a fresh boot. So I did.
I installed wine straight away via the Porteus Repo. The PPM told me everything went fine, I activated the module and so on, but it is as if nothing had happened. In the terminal "wine" is not know, but the PPM tells me the module is activated... Then I went to slax.org, downloaded their wine.sb module for Slax7 and then it worked ! in the terminal "wine" worked. BUT: I couldn't install my class-administration software, although in Slax7 this worked.

But what didn't work neither in Slax nor in Porteus are the other three:
I found Osmo via the PPM in the Debian Repo, converted it, activated but it doesn't work when clicked in the menu, and when I type 'osmo' in the terminal I get this error message: "osmo: error while loading shared libraries: libtar.so.0: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory" So, there is a dependecy missing. I thought the whole point of a package manager is to resolve the dependencies, so what did I do wrong ?

(In fact, I do not really understand the Porteus Package Manager : what do I download ? Packages or Modules ? Is there a difference ? Is there a difference between slax7 .sb modules and Porteus .xzm modules ? )

Notecase 1.9.8 for example is available as a slack.tar.gz for slack 12.1 But I have tried everything with it, it just won't work...
same for Kingsoft Office.

So before I lose my mind, could a compassionate soul please explain how one goes about installing software in Porteus ? Especially software which has no specific module, but which exists as rpm or deb or tar.xz....

Thank you very much for your patience.

Gilles

[wread]

Hi yggdrasill, welcome an board!

I will try to explain:
-Porteus is a "live" OS, that means, it installs itself every time you start your computer. And that in say 45 seconds (by me) or so.

-A module is a compressed unit (it can be a whole application, a library, your special settings or whatever) with a .xzm extension in Porteus. When a module is "installed" or "activated", it decompresses itself very quickly, directly to the correct place in the system.

Now to your specific problems: I think they are solved if you can install and use wine; the bad news is that using wine with MS programs is equivalent to running MSWindows and so you are again the preferred target of viri.

Your preferred programs, however are not free software, they are at least shareware, that is you will have to pay for its use. Maybe you can find equivalent software to your preferred ones that are free; in that case, we will be able to help you. Maybe you can try KMymoney and maybe Libreoffice (at least Porteus-version) is not so unfriendly as you suggest! NoteCase is an inactive project since 2008; maybe it is still up-to-date. In Porteus everything 5 years old is obsolete!

I hope these thoughts will give you a starting orientation to computing with Porteus.

Regards!

[yggdrasill]

Thank you very much for the quick answer and the warm welcome !

I will think it over what you said: if I'm getting it right, you are suggesting, that as long as I'm on an open OS, I might as well rely only on open/free software all along ? It sure would spare me all the hassle getting software to work that is not in the repositories, ergo not especially tailored to the distribution...!!

The problem is that I do some heavy work with Presentations, and in Impress I always get the felling I need 3 clicks/operations more than in Powerpoint/Kingsoft Presentation to get the job done. In Kingsoft Presentation my workflow is much faster. So I would be reluctant to switch to LibreOffice. But I am more than ok to replace the others with something else. Does somebody know good free/open alternatives or even clones to notecase and osmo ?

Otherwise are you saying that it is not possible to get Kingsoft Office up and running in Porteus from a .deb / .rpm / .tar.xz file ? In Slax something funny happened: I downloaded the tar.xz file, decompressed it, tried some things, tweaked around and all of a sudden, by only clicking on a wpp.sh script, Kingsoft Presentation started ! Unfortunately I cannot remember the things I tweaked before. I was just playing around, and then it worked. I loaded a fresh Slax7 because I messed up the old one, but I was not able this time to get Kingsoft working... So there must be a quite simply way to get it work...

So, if anyone could help me on this... (or is it that one is not allowed to help with this, because Kingsoft is proprietary and we are in a GNU community...?)

Thanks again and have a nice week-end.

Gilles

[tome]

simply unpack deb (data.tar.lzma from it) , rpm or tar.xz and execute et, wpp or wps. You can also create launcher in menu (edit path in ....desktop files and copy these to home/guest/.local/share/applications). Now Kingsoft office is for i486 but in the end of year should be also x64 version (wps-community.org/).

packages for Porteus are modules

[francois]

If it worked in slax, there are really great chances that it will work in porteus. 8)

Have a look at faq to understand modules better, google is your friend with keywords porteus, faq, modules:
http://www.porteus.org/tutorials/36-mod ... dules.html

[wread]

@francois
This link is broken!

[francois]

The one that I gave works for me. I tested it right now. 8)

[Payoon]

Hi yggdrasill
I have made osmo modules for 32 and 64 bit. Which one do you need and how can I get it to You ( I have no dropbox or something like that)?
Myself I think OSMO is very very useful. I use it everyday and store everything in it.
Greetings Payoon