Exploring Porteus 3.0.1



The Porteus website tells us: " Porteus is a complete Linux operating system that is optimized to run from CD, USB flash drive, hard drive, or other bootable storage media. It's small (under 300 MB) and insanely fast which allows you to start up and get online while most other operating systems are left spitting dust. " It is a bold claim from the Slackware-based distribution which ships in two main flavours, Kiosk or Desktop. The Desktop flavour of Porteus can further be broken into several desktop editions, including KDE, LXDE, MATE, Razor-qt and Xfce. Each of these different flavours can be downloaded in 32-bit or 64-bit x86 builds. However, what really makes Porteus stand out is the project's custom ISO builder. This web-based build system allows visitors to create custom ISO images. Using the build tool we can choose which hardware architecture, desktop environment, web browser, word processor and video driver we want. There are other options too which deal with whether we want printing, a VoIP client or developer tools included in our download.



I decided to download two copies of Porteus. The first was the pre-built Razor-qt edition of the distribution. The other was a custom LXDE build I put together using the ISO builder. The Razor-qt image was a mere 220MB download while the custom LXDE build was approximately 430 MB in size and featured virtually every extra package available. I experimented with both the pre-built image and my custom image and found both worked approximately the same way and carried similar applications. For the purposes of this review I'm going to focus on my experiences with the pre-built Razor-qt flavour of Porteus.



Booting from the Porteus media brings us to a menu where we can decide how to run the Porteus distribution. Our options include running Porteus with a live desktop environment, loading the entire distribution into RAM and then running the live desktop, running Porteus with a command line interface only or using Porteus as a PXE network server. The default option brings us to the distribution's desktop environment, Razor-qt in my case, where we find the interface has been arranged in the classic manner. At the bottom of the screen we find the application menu, task switcher ad system tray. The default wallpaper shows us a seascape with a sailing ship. I soon found that I was logged into a guest account on the live media and any administrative tasks required I enter a password. This password wasn't immediately obvious, but I found "toor" was the password required to access administrative functions.







Porteus 3.0.1 - the Razor-qt desktop

(full image size: 726kB, screen resolution 1280x1024 pixels)



The Porteus system installer is a graphical application which includes very few steps. The installer offers to place the operating system on either a USB drive or hard drive. The installer requires we have a destination partition prepared ahead of time. On the chance we do not have a waiting partition for Porteus, the distribution's system installer will assist us by launching the GParted partition manager. I had to use GParted to reformat a suitable partition and found the Porteus system installer could not see the destination partition. Rebooting the machine and re-launching the distribution's system installer caused the newly formatted partition to appear in the list of possible destinations. Once we select our desired partition from a list we are asked to confirm the selected partition may be overwritten. We are also given the chance to install a boot loader on our computer's hard drive. The Porteus installer copies its files to the selected partition and then we are asked to reboot the computer. When we reboot the machine we are shown the same boot options we saw when running from the live media. Taking the default boot option brings us quickly back to the Razor-qt desktop where we are automatically logged in under the guest account.



I tried running Porteus in two environments, a physical desktop machine and a VirtualBox virtual machine. I found getting Porteus to run on the physical computer took some doing. Most distributions will work on physical hardware if their image is simply copied to a USB thumb drive and we can then boot from the thumb drive. Porteus has a rather roundabout method where we need to format a thumb drive, extract files from the ISO image we downloaded and then run a script. I tried this and found the instructions on the Porteus website worked and I was able to get the distribution running on a USB drive. Once running from the USB drive the distribution correctly detected my hardware, set my screen to its maximum resolution and audio worked without any problems. Porteus worked well (and without extra steps) in the VirtualBox environment. In both environments the Razor-qt edition of Porteus required approximately 200MB of memory to run.







Porteus 3.0.1 - running various desktop applications

(full image size: 541kB, screen resolution 1280x1024 pixels)



Porteus ships with a powerful collection of applications. Digging through the application menu we find the Firefox web browser with the Adobe Flash plugin. The distribution ships with the Pidgin messaging client, the Transmission bittorrent client and the Qwit Twitter client. The distribution offer us the TigerVNC remote desktop software, the Trojita e-mail client, the uGet download client and the gFTP file transfer utility. There is a document viewer and the Leafpad text editor. Porteus ships with several multimedia applications including the VLC media player, the WinFF multimedia format converter and the Qmmp audio player. There is an application labelled as SMplayer which lets us browse YouTube videos. The distribution supplies popular media codecs letting us play a range of formats.



Porteus provides us with a disc burning application, a screen recorder, the GNU Image Manipulation Program, an image viewer, a calculator and an archive manager. There is an application for gathering information about our computer's hardware and a settings panel for making minor adjustments to the desktop environment. Browsing further through the application menu turns up the Grsync file synchronization utility, the GParted partition manager and Network Manager to help us get on-line. The pre-built Razor-qt image contained no compiler and no instances of Java. In the background I found the Linux kernel, version 3.14.



A few of the default applications stood out. The first was the Qwit Twitter client. Despite its many attractive options and filters I found I was unable to get Qwit to connect to my Twitter account. The second application that stood out was the software labelled SMplayer, which turned out to be a YouTube client. Clicking on videos in the application's window in an attempt to watch them caused the VLC player to launch and then stall, apparently unable to connect to the desired video. The YouTube client did feature an option where I could right-click on an item and choose to watch a video in my web browser. The web browser option worked, but this basically meant I was using the YouTube client merely as a complicated launcher for my web browser. It was much easier to simply open Firefox and visit YouTube directly. Finally, a third application deserves mention. There was one item called VirtualBox Builder. This application offers to build, from source, either the VirtualBox application or the VirtualBox Guest Additions module. While I was running Porteus inside a VirtualBox virtual machine I tried building the Guest module and found it worked flawlessly. I like to see distributions offer virtual machine support and this feature was welcome.







Porteus 3.0.1 - managing packages and changing desktop settings

(full image size: 578kB, screen resolution 1280x1024 pixels)



Porteus features an unusual package manager. The graphical application, called simply "USM", starts off by showing us a message letting us know we need to manually download repository information. We can do this by going into one of USM's menus and selecting one of the update options. Once repository information has been downloaded we can type searches for packages or libraries. There is no option to let us browse all available software and there are no category filters, we can only find software by searching for its specific name. Searches return lists of packages with names matching our keywords. We then highlight the package we want and click a Download button. This downloads the package (and its dependencies) into a directory on our computer, the software is not installed for us. Installing packages requires another trip to the menu and selecting the install option. We can then browse to the directory containing our packages and opt to install them, either all at once or one at a time. I attempted to install four different packages and, while USM claimed all its operations were successful, none of the installed items showed up in my user's path, nor in standard locations such as /usr/bin or /usr/local/bin. This made USM one of the most complex and least useful package managers I have used to date.



Conclusions



Were I to evaluate Porteus as a general purpose operating system the distribution would fail to gain good marks in most areas. Porteus does not play well with USB thumb drives, the installer really doesn't give us much flexibility, we are given one default user account, no practical security and no meaningful way to acquire additional software. The two areas where Porteus does shine are speed and default applications. Porteus boots very quickly, taking just a few seconds to come on-line. The distribution's memory footprint is small and its performance is top notch on the desktop. Porteus ships with a good collection of default software, giving us a wide range of functionality. The Porteus custom ISO builder is a nice touch as it gives us more flexibility. By default the Porteus download image is quite small and the custom builder lets us flesh out the ISO, adding more items we might need.



What I'm coming around to is that Porteus might not be a good general purpose distribution, but it is a decent live CD. Since we can customize the ISO and the distribution has low resource requirements and is fast at everything it does, the operating system is ideal as a travel companion. Often times I find myself wanting to fire up a live CD to test something or quickly access an on-line resource. Booting a mainstream distribution from a live CD is usually slow as there are a lot of items to load into memory. Porteus does a nice job of getting to the desktop quickly and giving us a handful of basic tools to get work done.



Porteus, in some ways, bears a resemblance to Puppy Linux. Both are quick to boot, both are lightweight, both are fast and make it easy to get on-line to browse the web or check messages. Porteus may not be quite as beginner friendly as Puppy, but I feel it serves well in the same role of being a travelling companion and Porteus ships with more mainstream software. The ability to customize the Porteus experience before we even download the distribution is a nice bonus.



* * * * * Hardware used in this review



My physical test equipment for this review was a desktop HP Pavilon p6 Series with the following specifications: Processor: Dual-core 2.8 GHz AMD A4-3420 APU

Storage: 500 GB Hitachi hard drive

Memory: 6 GB of RAM

Networking: Realtek RTL8111 wired network card

Display: AMD Radeon HD 6410D video card