Curiosity always get the better of me when I come across something new in the Linux landscape and feel that urge to explore it just a bit more. Why stop at reading a quick review or watch a YouTube video, when I can get a hands on and decide for myself if what I discover is really the next best thing. Lightweight Linux distros have always interested me, partly because I don’t really own any top of the line hardware and what I have is growing older as days go by. I really wonder how long will these machine serve their purpose before I am left with little option but to chuck them for something latest.
While browsing through list of lightweight options I came across Porteus. What a curious name, I thought, and made my way to the Porteus home page to learn some more about this distro. Couple things really stood apart. First its based on Slackware, something which I wasn’t really familiar with so its just another chance to learn something new. Second it was all of 170MB download but promised a full blown XFCE desktop and third its boot menu was really interesting. It allows you to run Porteus with options like a “Start afresh” which is a default session as if it were booting for the first time, it also allows to save sessions so that next time you log in, you could continue where you left off, it also allowed loading the entire OS into ram making it blazing fast even on old hardware.
It is offered in two flavors. One being a traditional desktop with wide choice of desktop environments (KDE, XFCE, MATE to name few) and second being a kiosk edition which had lock down on the softwares installed so that only the browser is available as the primary program. This is an interesting concept and more distros should explore it. A kiosk can serve as a dummy terminal to allow limited computing functionality(mostly internet access) at common places like cafes, hotels etc. Porteus also has a do-it-yourself distro wizard where you can pick and choose components that you want installed in the system and download the generated image for use. We have seen this in Suse studio, but its interesting to see this for tiny isos as well.
I had chosen to download the 170MB 32 bit XFCE image from Porteus and decided to give it a spin. Live boot was smooth and fast. The xfce desktop is quite snappy and made me think whether LXLE, my previous installation, was really bloat! After tinkering enough with Porteus, I have come to believe that with Porteus my old toshiba laptop feels more fast and responsive. The default set of programs is impressive. I can get on with daily computing needs with default installed programs which include a browser, a music player, a video player, a multi-chat client, a bit torrent client, a ftp program, a download manager, a cd ripper, an iso mounter, a dvd burner, a pdf reader, an image viewer et all. Out of the box, this thoughtful selection of softwares give the user all that he needs to get going. Whats missing is maybe an office suite or a serious image editor like gimp, but think “bloat” and you will realise why these things are left out of the Porteus iso. For a 170MB installer, it has managed to cram in a lot of functionality.
Running Porteus off the cd was fast enough and I wanted to install it onto my HDD and start using it as my primary OS. The Porteus installer program helps install Porteus on the machine, it is a non destructive installation i think. You could install it side by side with an existing setup as well ( Windows or Linux ). Porteus just copies itself to a dedicated boot partition and boots from there if you choose to install a bootloader as well. Porteus also keeps tab of the changes you make to the system and loads these changes when you boot normally. If you choose to boot a “fresh” Porteus, it only loads the default one and no changes are reflected. This is something which I really liked.
For the eyecandy I took to gnome-look.org for some interesting XFCE themes and Icons. After tinkering a bit I was quickly able to transform the default into something more vibrant.
Got a quick make over to
The XFCE theme is Radiance Flat and Icon set is Ultra Flat.
Eye candy is really a personal choice for everybody, so its difficult to say whether the changes I made appeal to someone else. You are free to change things however you like.
From what I see so far, I seem to like Porteus. Its software manager is different than the usual debian installations that I am used to, but once I get past the initial learning curve, I should be comfortable finding my way with this nifty little thing that I accidently discovered. I feel its a good replacement for Puppy as a rescue disk but at the same time be a worthy full blown installation for my aging machines. Let me have fun with this while it lasts.
Leisure Linux 