Mayank Sharma has a soft spot for portable distros, and wonders if the latest Porteus can wean him away from his all-time favourite, Slax.
Porteus 5 is the latest edition of one of the best portable and wellestablished distros. The Slackware 15-based distro now offers seven separate ISO images, each with a different desktop, from fully fledged options such as Cinnamon and KDE to lightweight ones such as LXQt, LXDE, Openbox and more.
The ISOs of most editions weigh in at around 300MB thanks to Porteus’ design that keeps the distro in a compressed state, only creating the familiar Linux directory structure on the fly during boot.
To create a bootable Porteus media, instead of dd’ing its ISO file on to a USB stick, you need to loopback mount it and copy its contents on to an EXT4 formatted disk. Then run a script from inside the USB to make it bootable and you’re good to go. The process is a little off-canter, but is nicely explained in the official installation guide. Porteus also offers a unique boot menu with some interesting options. There’s the usual option to copy the live environment to RAM, which promises a faster experience on PCs that have enough resources. Porteus’ speciality is the option to initialise a PXE server, or accessing the PLoP boot manager.
By default, the Porteus live session is persistent, and will automatically save all changes made to the Live environment. However, you do get the option to boot into a pristine session in the boot menu.
Part and parcel
Package management is a Porteus speciality. The entire distro is delivered via modules that you activate and deactivate as per your requirements. If you move the application modules to a designated directory inside the removable storage, the program is available in subsequent boots as well.
Previously Porteus used the Unified Slackware Package Manager (USM) to fetch programs from across five different Slackware repositories, whi
