Ways of changing desktop under porteus

[francois]

There are different ways of changing desktop under porteus. You are invited to provide your receipies.

You would like to interchange the kde for another one? Here ahau's suggestion:
http://forum.porteus.org/viewtopic.php?f=39&t=2446
Porteus is perfectly capable of running all 5 Desktops from the same installation, and here's how:
1) Place your desired desktop modules (e.g. 003-kde.xzm, 003-lxde.xzm, and 003-mate.xzm) on your media inside the folder /porteus/optional.
2) Boot your system with the cheatcode 'load=kde' to boot into kde, or 'load=lxde', etc.

See cheatcodes of porteus:
http://www.porteus.org/tutorials/26-gen ... -them.html

This is one way to do it. Other ways simple and complex are proposed in the following posts.
Edited 150214 after bogomips suggestion (thanks).

[beny]

hi francois but you can do the same in two way the simple one xwmconfig choose the de and start it, the second one startx for kde startxfce4 for xfce

[Bogomips]

@francois

1. The thread title is somewhat misleading, as it would give the impression that the way you outlined was the only way of easily changing desktops. i.e one would have to use extramod and changes.
2. Not all Newbies are inexperienced Linux users, so the method I gave in my post in other DE thread, using the optional directory, should also have been mentioned as a possibility when running in always fresh mode. Feel free to move the post into this thread.
3. There are also the other ways, as mentioned in beny's post, which could bear explaining, as I haven't much of a clue on how to go about it, and this is after all a newbies section.
4. Lastly, when all is said and done, could not the thread be made more lasting, like a tutorial?

[francois]

@beny:
In agreement with bogomips, I am not sure on a step by step basis, how I would modify my system to be able to follow your suggestion.

@bogomips:
All your points are valuable. Though I was just providing a link for jacoby who wants a video recorder on xfce. It is not always easy to evaluate who is linux proficient and who is not.

You should make an hyperlink in your post to the thread you have mentioned on accessing another desktop.

I have modified the title and the first post hoping to take into account the spirit of your comments and have proposed ahau's solution, which is a lot better than my way of doing it.

Sadly, contrarily to the little panel stating that I am from the doc team, I have not contributed on writing a line of the porteus faq. I will nevertheless displace my way to do it in the next post.

[francois]

My method using extramod= cheatcode is clearly more complicated than Ahau's method cited in the first post. But it provides the advantage of having a save changes= folder per desktop environment.

Here is my menu.lst as an example:

Code: Select all

title porteus  on sda5 64bit_v31 LXQT 
root (hd0,4)
kernel /64bit_v31/boot/syslinux/vmlinuz from=/dev/sda5/64bit_v31 extramod=/mnt/sda5/64bit_v31/lxqt changes=EXIT:/64bit_v31/lxqt   login=root
initrd /64bit_v31/boot/syslinux/initrd.xz
boot

title porteus  on sda5 64bit_v31 XFCE 
root (hd0,4)
kernel /64bit_v31/boot/syslinux/vmlinuz from=/dev/sda5/64bit_v31 extramod=/mnt/sda5/64bit_v31/xfce changes=EXIT:/64bit_v31/xfce   login=root
initrd /64bit_v31/boot/syslinux/initrd.xz
boot

title porteus  on sda5 64bit_v30  KDE 
root (hd0,4)
kernel /64bit_v30/boot/syslinux/vmlinuz from=/dev/sda5/64bit_v30 extramod=/mnt/sda5/64bit_v30/kde changes=EXIT:/64bit_v30/kde   login=root
initrd /64bit_v30/boot/syslinux/initrd.xz
boot

For your use: 1) erase the content after changes=, and replace it with a specific folder for the saving of your desktop settings, 2) you have to place the respective 003-lxqt.xzm, 003-xfce.xzm and 003-kde.xzm in the pointed extramodular (extramod=) folders, /mnt/sda5/64bit_v31rc1/lxqt, /mnt/sda5/64bit_v31rc1/xfce and /mnt/sda5/64bit_v31rc1/kde. Make sure that these do not appear also in the /mnt/sda5/64bit_v31rc1/porteus/base folder (003-kde.xzm, ... instances).

You can find the other de in:
http://dl.porteus.org/x86_64/current/modules/

Make sure to use the appropriate desktop environments versions for your installation. Here, I was using 3.1 and 3.0.

Syntax for syslinux (the official porteus loader) and grub2 could be available on demand.

[Bogomips]

Find it easiest to change DE by rebooting, but then I always run in always fresh mode.

• Put all the other desktops (excepting your usual one):
  003-kde.xzm
  003-lxqt.xzm
  003-mate.xzm
  003-xfce.xzm
  in 'porteus/optional' folder.
• Reboot using kernel params (cheatcodes): noload=<usual DE> load=<other DE>
  eg. noload=xfce load=3-lxqt , where here '3-lxqt' uniquely identifies module from others in porteus/optional

Ahau's detailed explanation from first post here: http://forum.porteus.org/viewtopic.php?f=39&t=2446

@francois
Did not mean as a doc, but as entry in the Tutorials section of the forum

[francois]

Understood that this not newbie stuff and changed to a more appropriate section with a more appropriate title.

[francois]

Brokenman's review of the ways to change porteus desktop environment:
http://forum.porteus.org/viewtopic.php? ... 3&start=30
DESKTOPS:
Porteus will boot to the desktop of whatever 003 module is loaded last. There should only be one. It resides in the porteus/base folder. If you want to choose between desktops at boot time you can download the extra 003-desktop.xzm modules from http://dl.porteus.org and place them in the porteus/optional folder. So (for example) if you have 003-xfce.xzm in the base folder and all the others in the optional folder you can use a cheatcode at boot time to choose. To do this hit TAB at the bootloader screen and type: noload=003-xfce load=003-kde

This will tell porteus not to load the 003-xfce module that is in the base folder, and to load any module from the optional folder that has the name "003-kde" in it. In this way you can decide on the desktop at boot. Be warned that any changes file that once saved 003-xfce related stuff will still be loaded (if you are using the changes= cheat) along with the 003-kde desktop which may or may not screw something up.