Porteus was recommended to me recently as a linux distribution that I should review.
For those of you that are unaware, Porteus is a portable Linux distribution designed to be run from a USB drive much like Puppy Linux or Knoppix.
The Porteus website has the following to say about it:
Porteus is a complete linux operating system that is optimized to run from CD, USB flash drive, hard drive, or other bootable storage media. It's small (under 300Mb) and insanely fast which allows you to start up and get online while most other operating systems are left spitting dust. Porteus comes in both 32 & 64 bit and aims to keep on the bleeding edge.
I normally spend a week reviewing a distribution but for reasons that become clear I haven't taken so long on this one.
There are some things I really quite liked about Porteus but there are some things that frustrated me.
So without further ado lets get on with the review.
How To Get PorteusYou can download Porteus by visiting http://build.porteus.org/
The first thing to note is that you don't get the normal download link. Instead you get to customise before you begin. This is actually a really good idea.
For instance you can choose between 32-bit and 64-bit, whether you require the EFI bootloader or not, whether you want to boot to a graphical desktop and you can also choose the desktop you wish to use from one of KDE, Gnome, XFCE and LXQT.
Also on the page you choose the timezone, keyboard layout and for some reason the volume level.
Another thing you can do is choose default software selections. For instance you can choose to install Chrome, FireFox or the Opera web browser. You can also choose your word processor, whether to install Skype or not and whether to include development tools.
There is a drivers section so that you can choose the one for your specific graphics card. You can also decide whether to install printing support.
The selection mechanism is nice and easy to understand. Point and click. So far so good.
How To Create The Porteus USB DriveThe Porteus website provides 2 methods for creating a USB drive if you are using windows.
The first is to download the Universal USB Installer which you can get from http://www.pendrivelinux.com/universal-usb-installer-easy-as-1-2-3/
There is a download button at the bottom of the page. Be careful because it always looks like the download button is at the top of the page but that button actually installs the software for an advertised product.
After Universal USB Installer has downloaded you just double click on the file to start the program.
The initial step is accept the license agreement.
When the main screen appears choose Porteus from the drop down list in step 1 and then click the browse button and locate the downloaded Porteus ISO file.
Finally select the drive letter for the USB drive and click Create.
The other way to install Porteus to a USB drive works for both Windows and Linux.
Simply mount the ISO. You can usually open an ISO in Windows explorer if you are using Windows 7 upwards. In most Linux distributions you can mount an ISO using an archive manager.
With the ISO mounted Extract the files from the ISO straight to the USB drive.
Finally navigate to the boot folder and double click on either the Windows installer or Linux installer file.
Remember that Porteus is designed to run from a USB drive so there is no actual installation to hard drive required.
The Porteus Save File DebacleIf you are running Linux from a USB drive then you will need some way of persisting changes that you make.
In Porteus this is achieved by creating a save file.
To create a save file you boot into Porteus and then from the settings menu there is a save file creation tool.
When you select the menu option you are asked for the root password. What? When did I set a root password? I didn't. So what is the root password?
I had to go to Google to find out. There is an faq page which has various topics such as how do I change the root password . It is this page that shows you the default root password. Maybe it would be good to add the topic "what is the default root password?".
The save file wizard is fairly straight forward. You can create a new file, resize an existing save file, encrypt a save file or recover a broken save file.
Upon clicking on the new save file link you are asked to name the file, choose a file size and choose the file location.
Under advanced it defaults the file system as xfs but you can also choose ext4.
When you click OK the save file will be created. Be patient because it takes a few minutes.
After the installation has completed a message will appear with the name and path of your saved file. Rather curiously it says you need to edit porteus.cfg and it says you will need to change a line but it doesn't say which line you need to edit and this is where the frustrations really begin.
There is a page on the Porteus website which goes into great details about how to create a save file . The page even tells you which lines to edit in the porteus.cfg file.
LABEL xconf
MENU LABEL Graphics mode (KDE).
KERNEL /boot/syslinux/vmlinuz
APPEND initrd=/boot/syslinux/initrd.xz changes=/porteus/
TEXT HELP
Run Porteus the best way we can.
Try to autoconfigure graphics
card and use the maximum
allowed resolution
ENDTEXT
LABEL lxde
MENU LABEL Graphics mode (LXDE).
KERNEL /boot/syslinux/vmlinuz
APPEND initrd=/boot/syslinux/initrd.xz changes=/porteus/
TEXT HELP
Run Porteus the same as above.
Lightweight LXDE to be
launched as default desktop
ENDTEXT
All you have to do is amend the bits that say changes= to changes=/porteus/porteussave.dat (or whatever you called the file and wherever you saved it).
I did this, changed the wallpaper and rebooted the computer. I chose the option to boot Porteus again and my wallpaper was back to the default.
I tried various things to get the save file to work and then I realised that if I booted in non EFI mode then the save file would be correctly used to save changes but if I used EFI mode then it always loaded without the save file.
