Porteus (formerly Slax Remix) is a portable

operating system An operating system (OS) is system software that manages computer hardware, software resources, and provides common services for computer programs. Time-sharing operating systems schedule tasks for efficient use of the system and may also in ...

based on

Slackware Slackware is a Linux distribution created by Patrick Volkerding in 1993. Originally based on Softlanding Linux System, Slackware has been the basis for many other Linux distributions, most notably the first versions of SUSE Linux distributions ...

. It does not require installation and can be run from fixed and removable media, such as a

USB flash drive A USB flash drive (also called a thumb drive) is a data storage device that includes flash memory with an integrated USB interface. It is typically removable, rewritable and much smaller than an optical disc. Most weigh less than . Since firs ...

compact disc The compact disc (CD) is a Digital media, digital optical disc data storage format that was co-developed by Philips and Sony to store and play digital audio recordings. In August 1982, the first compact disc was manufactured. It was then rele ...

. Porteus is available in 32-bit and 64-bit version.

Development

The Porteus project started out as "Slax Remix" at the beginning of 2010 and was started as a community project using the Zen kernel to improve and update the

Slax Slax is a LiveCD Linux distribution developed by Tomáš Matějíček and based on upstream customizable Linux distributions. Packages can be added by apt package manager or can be prepared as modules. The tagline for Slax refers to itself as " ...

OS. The community agreed on the new name of the project, Porteus, which was named after "' Portability' and '

Proteus In Greek mythology, Proteus (; Ancient Greek: Πρωτεύς, ''Prōteus'') is an early prophetic sea-god or god of rivers and oceanic bodies of water, one of several deities whom Homer calls the "Old Man of the Sea" ''(hálios gérôn)''. ...

'. 'Proteus' is a "Greek god of the sea, capable of changing his form at will," according to the naming announcement on the Porteus forum. The project leader commented on the name, "I find this name as a kind of synonym of 'flexibility.' We have portable (small) and flexible (modular) features included in one name: Porteus." Porteus 4.0 is available in seven desktop variants:

Cinnamon Cinnamon is a spice obtained from the inner bark of several tree species from the genus ''Cinnamomum''. Cinnamon is used mainly as an aromatic condiment and flavouring additive in a wide variety of cuisines, sweet and savoury dishes, breakfa ...

KDE Plasma 5 KDE Plasma 5 is the fifth and current generation of the graphical workspaces environment created by KDE primarily for Linux systems. KDE Plasma 5 is the successor of KDE Plasma 4 and was first released on 15 July 2014. It includes a new default ...

LXDE LXDE (abbreviation for Lightweight X11 Desktop Environment) is a free desktop environment with comparatively low resource requirements. This makes it especially suitable for use on older or resource-constrained personal computers such as netb ...

LXQt LXQt is a free and open source lightweight desktop environment. It was formed from the merger of the LXDE and Razor-qt projects. Like its GTK predecessor LXDE, LXQt does not ship or develop its own window manager, instead LXQt lets the user de ...

MATE Mate may refer to: Science * Mate, one of a pair of animals involved in: ** Mate choice, intersexual selection ** Mating * Multi-antimicrobial extrusion protein, or MATE, an efflux transporter family of proteins Person or title * Friendship ...

, Openbox and Xfce.

Features

Porteus is based on a substantially modified and optimized version of the Linux Live Scripts. It can be run from a disk or USB stick (with changes saved onto the portable device) or installed on a hard drive. Porteus can even be installed within another system without the need to create a new partition. Porteus is preloaded with a variety of software that the user selects before installing. The system is downloaded only after selecting various options from a menu including one of four windows management systems, a browser and other features. Porteus uses a package manager utilizing slackware.

Porteus Kiosk

Porteus Kiosk is a specialized edition of the Porteus operating system, a minimalist Linux distribution for web-only terminals with Firefox (or Google Chrome, Chromium or Opera, set upon installation) as the sole application. Porteus Kiosk provides users with a locked down computing environment, designed to be deployed in schools, offices, public libraries,

internet café An Internet café, also known as a cybercafé, is a café (or a convenience store or a fully dedicated Internet access business) that provides the use of computers with high bandwidth Internet access on the payment of a fee. Usage is generally ...

s or any other business establishment that provides Internet access to their clients. Porteus Kiosk can be installed to CD/DVD, USB flash drive, hard drive, or any other bootable storage media such as Compact Flash or SD/MMC memory cards. Prior to installation the system can be customized through the ''kiosk wizard'' utility which allows system and browser related tweaks. The Porteus Kiosk system is open source and available free-of-charge, although a number of commercial services such as custom builds, automatic updates and software upgrades are available. Until version 3.7.0 Porteus Kiosk was able to run on both 32-bit (i486 or greater) and 64-bit (x86_64) machines. As Google Chrome doesn't support 32-bit machines anymore, the developers of the distribution decided to follow that path. Hence with release 4.0.0 Porteus Kiosk supports only the x86_64 architecture. The system is lightweight in terms of size and resources used. The default image is about 80 MB while the size of the custom kiosk ISO will depend on the choice of added extra components such as

Adobe Flash Adobe Flash (formerly Macromedia Flash and FutureSplash) is a multimedia Computing platform, software platform used for production of Flash animation, animations, rich web applications, application software, desktop applications, mobile apps, mo ...

Java Java (; id, Jawa, ; jv, ꦗꦮ; su, ) is one of the Greater Sunda Islands in Indonesia. It is bordered by the Indian Ocean to the south and the Java Sea to the north. With a population of 151.6 million people, Java is the world's List ...

, additional fonts and other factors.

Reception

In reviewing Porteus 1.0 in June 2011, Joe "Zonker" Brockmeier wrote, "Users who've missed KDE 3.5.x are in for a treat with Porteus, a portable Linux distribution that offers a 32-bit release with the Trinity fork of KDE 3.5.x, and a 64-bit release that offers KDE 4.6.4. While not a distribution that will appeal to everyone, it might be of interest to enthusiasts of live CD distributions and old-school KDE fans." He concluded "...Porteus looks like a nice portable Linux distribution, aimed at expert or at least experienced Linux users. It's not something that will appeal to the majority of Linux users, particularly users who prefer a slightly larger depth of available packages. But, for users who are nursing older hardware or prefer a portable distribution, Porteus is an interesting project." About the custom Live CD ISO creation, Linux magazine wrote in Issue 160/2014: "Build Your Own Portable Linux Distro with Porteus Building a customized Linux distribution can be a daunting proposition – unless you use Porteus Wizard. This clever and simple service lets you create a custom Live CD distro that fits a USB stick and loads in RAM."

References

External links