I follow Distrowatch a lot. It is the best window available to anyone to know about the latest happenings in distribution world. There I came across the release of Porteus linux 1.2, a slackware based minimalistic linux. Porteus stands for Portable Linux and really it is portable at 250 MB odd size. You can download the 32-bit & 64-bit ISOs from the Porteus website. Amazing that the developers could pack KDE in a 250 MB ISO!!!
I booted it up on my VirtualBox with 2 GB RAM allocated to it. Booting time was fast and I was greeted with a pleasant looking screen. The KDE desktop looks better than the LXDE one.
Out of the Box Applications
Application-wise I found Porteus to be quite rich with Firefox (out of the box Flash support), Gnome M Player, Avahi SSH server, gFTP, Audo CD Ripper, Blu-ray writer, Sound mixer (KMix), Kcolor Paint, along with typical KDE applications. Only weak section is Office - it has Abiword in the default installation but users can download KOffice using the download link provided in the menu.
Further through Porteus Package Manager, one can download the best apps available in the Linux world. The password for guest is guest and the password for root is toor. One thing I really liked is the integration of Slackware and Debian applications. Indeed some serious research went in to create the distro!
A host of screenshots of the applications available and the desktop environment are in my Flickr Album Porteus. Please visit if you need more glimpse of the OS.
CPU & RAM Usage
Porteus scores really high here. It has very low CPU (5%) and RAM (102 MB) usage with no other app running.
Overall Assessment
My assessment is that it is really a great OS to have for low resource computers. You may need to download some applications (notably office), but you get a slick, nice looking distro with real great functionality. Also, I found out community support is good for Porteus. It can be a serious competitor to Puppy Linux for sure.
Out of the Box Applications
Application-wise I found Porteus to be quite rich with Firefox (out of the box Flash support), Gnome M Player, Avahi SSH server, gFTP, Audo CD Ripper, Blu-ray writer, Sound mixer (KMix), Kcolor Paint, along with typical KDE applications. Only weak section is Office - it has Abiword in the default installation but users can download KOffice using the download link provided in the menu.
A host of screenshots of the applications available and the desktop environment are in my Flickr Album Porteus. Please visit if you need more glimpse of the OS.
CPU & RAM Usage
Porteus scores really high here. It has very low CPU (5%) and RAM (102 MB) usage with no other app running.
Overall Assessment
My assessment is that it is really a great OS to have for low resource computers. You may need to download some applications (notably office), but you get a slick, nice looking distro with real great functionality. Also, I found out community support is good for Porteus. It can be a serious competitor to Puppy Linux for sure.
250 MB? With KDE? ARE THEY SERIOUS?
ReplyDeleteI mean, even just the kubuntu-desktop package on any _ubuntu costs that much! How can it be so unbelievably small? Linux never ceases to amaze me.
Hi Darshak, I found Porteus really good! Normally KDE doesn't run that well on low-resource environment - but this baby runs real fast! Also you get LXDE & XFCE (a diff ISO) alongside. Amazing for sure!
DeleteThe KDE environment here is now being called TDE (Trinity desktop environment) after KDE 3.5.10 was abandoned. As part of the dev team i can say that this TDE comes in a 50Mb compressed file! Please also check out the 64bit version where fanthom has packed KDE4 into a 86Mb file. Now that's impressive!
ReplyDeleteSlax 7.0 preview has packed KDE4 in 177mb! & This is the same version of KDE that is put in SLAX 6.1.2 which is only about 200 mb!
ReplyDeleteI refurbish older computers for charity and I have to say that this distro will not be on my short list for installation. It is Not very user friendly to set up at all. Confusing and difficult choices. Gparted spins for minutes with no effect. Strange error messages about drives not being mounted then suddenly mounting. Package manger asks you to assign a folder to it? And oh, you have to either have the "modules" folder not in home directory or not in root? Oh Please...they couldn't do that themselves when designing this distro?
ReplyDeleteThis is the type of stuff that makes Linux hard or impossible to figure out for average users. Compare it to puppy. No errors and runs like glass and you don't have to jump through hoops to get it to work.
Puppy is definitely a more robust operating system and perhaps the best of all the lightweight OSs I have used. Very dependable and works with almost all systems. But, Porteus brings a different proposition and I agree, it requires a bit of tinkering from the user to make it work. Possibly developers will be rectifying it in their future releases.
Delete"And oh, you have to either have the "modules" folder not in home directory or not in root? Oh Please...they couldn't do that themselves when designing this distro?"
ReplyDeleteAnd what do you propose? That they guess your system setup and where you want to store things? Should they bind the home folder to the first available partition found. Oh please ... do your homework before talking balony.
Porteus v2.0 is a BIG improvement. Very simple to install, even the guy that complained in the post above could do it. They must have read your post and listened because they removed the need to choose a storage folder. Check it out.
ReplyDeleteI know. I really liked Porteus 2 RC's. Will try out the distro soon. Thanks.
DeleteI installed Porteus 2.1 Very impressive!
ReplyDeleteHave to look and experiment with the boot and save change parameters. But storing xzm modules in the module folders works great.
Hope they will implement a dualpane filemanager like Krusader. I miss this application!! (or is there a alternative?)
Wimduk