mhbell Posted January 19, 2014 Share Posted January 19, 2014 (edited) Tonight I downloaded porteus which is a slackware derivative and is portable. It really isn't meant for HD instalation and is more for USB or cd /dvd to run from. I am running it in virtual box. If you want to build your own custom distro this might be the way to go. I will try and get a screen shot and post it. It is a very minimal distro and only takes about 160 MB on the CD. here is a link to the website http://www.porteus.org/ Edited January 19, 2014 by mhbell Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
abarbarian Posted January 19, 2014 Share Posted January 19, 2014 I was impressed with Porteus and then I was not . Seriously though it is a neat idea and I found it ran very well from a stick. There is a Porteus thread here if you have some contributions. http://forums.scotsnewsletter.com/index.php?showtopic=49230&hl=porteus Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
V.T. Eric Layton Posted January 19, 2014 Share Posted January 19, 2014 Porteus and SLAX are both never far from me. They are integral parts of my toolbox. I'm going to use Porteus in just a few minutes to partition/format the new drive I installed in my laptop last night. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
burninbush Posted January 20, 2014 Share Posted January 20, 2014 (edited) Tonight I downloaded porteus which is a slackware derivative and is portable. It really isn't meant for HD instalation and is more for USB or cd /dvd to run from. I am running it in virtual box. If you want to build your own custom distro this might be the way to go. I will try and get a screen shot and post it. It is a very minimal distro and only takes about 160 MB on the CD. here is a link to the website http://www.porteus.org/ I will just say here that it is trivially easy to do a 'frugal' install of Porteus to a hard disk. Just copy the entire content of the iso file [or cd] to a subdirectory somewhere on a hard disk partition, and add a couple lines to your boot util -- here I use grub or grub4dos, and the entry below works when I have copied into /dev/sdb3/port30 : title Port30 on /dev/sdb3 -- root (hd1,2) kernel /port30/boot/syslinux/vmlinuz vga=normal from=/dev/sdb3/port30 changes=/mnt/sdb3/port30.dat login=root initrd /port30/boot/syslinux/initrd.xz (edit: the kernel line is split on display, all the way to login=root is on the one kernel line) and you can see from this that I have used the Porteus app to make a changes.dat file, and have added the changes= cheatcode to tell Porteus where it is located. This is how to enable persistence when not on a linux filesystem. [this happens to be ntfs] I commonly add about 300 MB of additional modules to it. You can't tell, running it, that it is not a conventional slackware install. Edited January 20, 2014 by burninbush Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mhbell Posted January 20, 2014 Author Share Posted January 20, 2014 (edited) You can't tell, running it, that it is not a conventional slackware install. Why not install slax or slackware then. Seems to me that would be a lot easier. Edited January 20, 2014 by mhbell Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
burninbush Posted January 20, 2014 Share Posted January 20, 2014 Why not install slax or slackware then. Seems to me that would be a lot easier. ?? Hard to understand how installing Slackware could be as easy as copying the iso content to a subdirectory. It's literally a 2-minute operation. Slax is pretty much dead these days, while Porteus is still being updated. There are good reasons to go with a distro based on compressed modules as opposed to the conventional linux install. Not the least of which is that they are bullet-proof; delete the changes and you are back to brand new. Or, build it up as you like and run without saving changes -- in that case, a reboot will fix any damage. Building the system up with modules means you don't have to deal with dependencies -- unlike Slackware. Try adding VLC [for example] to a standard Slackware install. 2 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
securitybreach Posted January 20, 2014 Share Posted January 20, 2014 There are good reasons to go with a distro based on compressed modules as opposed to the conventional linux install. Not the least of which is that they are bullet-proof; delete the changes and you are back to brand new. Or, build it up as you like and run without saving changes -- in that case, a reboot will fix any damage. Building the system up with modules means you don't have to deal with dependencies -- unlike Slackware. Try adding VLC [for example] to a standard Slackware install. Hmm I could have some fun with that. Try to destroy the distro in as many way as I can think of.... I am not talking about the rm -rvf / stuff (do not run that command) but something a little more inventive. BTW I have executed that on a running install just to see what it looked like to implode a distro. Hmm I dunno if Porteus could survive that since it would removing the file system..... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
burninbush Posted January 20, 2014 Share Posted January 20, 2014 Hmm I could have some fun with that. Try to destroy the distro in as many way as I can think of.... I am not talking about the rm -rvf / stuff (do not run that command) but something a little more inventive. BTW I have executed that on a running install just to see what it looked like to implode a distro. Hmm I dunno if Porteus could survive that since it would removing the file system..... LOL -- an interesting test. I reckon it would depend on whether it found /mnt before it killed itself. If the storage location where Porteus was running from survived, then the OS would be fine after a reboot. If a person really needed ROM-like security, he could run it from an SD card with a write-protect switch. It might still be possible to get usbsticks with write-protect switches; has been a long time since I've seen one, though. I call it bullet-proof because the files holding the system modules -- from which the running system in memory is unpacked -- those are never opened for writing, and so they never get corrupted. If some problem symptom does persist through a reboot then you can be sure it's from something stored in the changes directory -- delete that, reboot, and it's fresh again. I was thinking of the running system in memory, which you could obviously kill with little effort, but it would be restored as new on a reboot. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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