Porteus Documentation--Development and Process

[Ahau]

Ok -- I have a job, for anyone who is willing to help (Doc team or otherwise).

I'd like to have better documentation for performing a frugal install to a hard drive. As you can see in the official install guide (http://porteus.org/info/docs/37-install ... rd%20Drive) the official documentation here is slim. This is on purpose, because I don't know how to do a frugal install beyond the basics, and because there are so many ways to do it.

That said, I would like to put up a number of HOWTO's with a similar format and steps, to get porteus booting with a variety of bootloaders and existing installs (linux and windows). I'll post the HOWTO's to the main site and create links to them from within the official install guide.

We have a guide already (thanks to brokenman!) for dual booting with windows:
http://porteus.org/info/docs/37-install ... ndows.html

If anyone has other ways they like to dual boot porteus with windows, please let us know, and a brief outline of instructions would be appreciated.

Also, I'd like to have HOWTO's on configuring Grub, Grub4dos, Grub2, lilo, and any other bootloader you all might be using, with example config files (e.g. menu.lst). In many cases the config files will be the most important step, because all folks really need to do is extract the files to their partition and configure their bootloader to see porteus. Examples showing how to boot from ISO's would also be great.

The goal is to make it clear and easy for someone with, for example, Ubuntu, to download Porteus, stick it in alongside Ubuntu, and learn what a real distro is all about

Thanks!

-Ahau

Posted after 20 hours 42 minutes 21 second:
I've modified the quick install instructions above and added them to the official install guide on the main website, as "Quick and Dirty Installation Instructions", so that advanced users can get an overview of the process, and only read more if they need to. Beginners will also then have an outline of the process, and not be scared off by a seemingly lengthy install process. I still think it would be good to keep the text above in a separate, easy to find text file in the root of the ISO.

[bour59]

I've just discover that I can see the structure of .xzm under windows
using last 7zip !
but for now Ican't modify anything .. Useful ? or gadget.

[Ahau]

thanks, bour59! Very cool! I'm not too surprised, because 7-zip uses LZMA compression. I think it would be useful for viewing the contents of a module, but I would not use it to create or modify modules, even if it could zip them back up and get changed to an .xzm extension. Here's why: All symlinks and permissions would be destroyed when you decompress the module to a windows filesystem (ok, yes, NTFS can handle symlinks--but still not perms). This would create a security issue at best, and major problems at worst.

[francois]

@Ahau:

At first glance I did not saw any information about printer installation, is there any? What is your method for printer installation under 64 bit Porteus?

[Ahau]

francois, you're correct. there is no printing how-to, and we need one. Wread has one for V09 in the howto's and resources forum, but I haven't updated and published it yet -- I don't ever print from Porteus.

[francois]

Thanks for this rapid answer. I thought that Wread had resolved his printer problems specifically. I will look into his writings.

[francois]

@Hamza:

There seems to be something incomplete on the info thread that your wrote on How to compress to maximum a module:
http://porteus.org/component/content/ar ... odule.html

Now, I will show you an example of compression :

mksquashfs /root/test /root/test.lzm -b 1M #for use in Porteus V 0.9 or earlier

mksquashfs /root/test /root/test.xzm -b 1M #for use in Porteus V 1.0 or greater


It 's an example of compression with 1024 Kb of block size.

Where do you show these? In this info summary is it possible to identify what is xzm and what is lzm?

From the source that you cite:
http://www.squashfs-lzma.org/

I could read:

SquashFS version 4 is included in Linux Kernel since 2.6.29 and it supports XZ (LZMA2) compression since 2.6.38.

Also, maybe we should make sure that when we present material from sources it is properly cited.