I love testing new Linux Distros that show lots of potential ‘Right Out Of The Gate‘ – and PorteuX 0.3 certainly does that!!! 👏👌👍
Am all over the place wid this one – testing this DE ‘n that DE, testing the Stable ‘n the Current, etc. whilst also trying to put a review together!? 🤯 Put together a bunch of pics, and then discover something new that makes those pics sorta old. 🤔
It is going to require at least one more ‘Part‘ – since it is still new, am trying to keep it to just two ‘Parts‘ for now. 😉
About
PorteuX is a Linux distro based on Slackware, inspired by Slax and Porteus and available to the public for free. Its main goal is to be super fast, small, portable, modular and immutable (if the user wants so).
It’s already pre-configured for basic usage, including lightweight applications for each one of the 6 desktop environments available. No browser is included, but an app store is provided so you can download the most popular browsers, as well as Steam, VirtualBox, Nvidia drivers, office suite, multilib lite, messengers, emulators, etc.
Out of the box PorteuX can open basically any multimedia file. Hardware acceleration is enabled by default for machines with Intel, AMD or Nvidia cards (for Nvidia cards it’s required to download Nvidia driver from the app store).
Porteus 5.0 Cinnamon is one of my Favorite Linux Distros, and is in fact my main working ‘Secondary‘ OS—Win11 Pro is my primary OS. PorteuX 0.3 is similar, but wid some very interesting ‘Twists‘ of its own.
How To Use
I love working wid these ‘Modular‘ Linux OSes – moving modules around in order to quickly create a fully functioning portable OS.
Snip .. PorteuX is a modular system so it doesn’t require a normal setup/installer. You can simply copy the ISO content to your media storage and run either porteux-installer-for-linux.run or porteux-installer-for-windows.exe (depending on which system you’re running) to make the unit bootable. It’s simple like that. Avoid ISO installer applications such as Rufus or Etcher because by default they set the bootable unit to be read-only. For more details, please read install.txt file in the root folder of the ISO.
Setting up PorteuX 0.3
Modular OS systems are incredibly flexible (great ones are—anyway), i.e., there are usually several++ ways of setting one up, IMHO, and here is how I did it…
I used GParted to prep a 16GB SanDisk Ultra Flair USB:
Created a 33 MiB fat32 partition, and used the rest for an ext4 partition.
Open whichever PorteuX iso you are going to use:
I only use the EFI, boot, and porteux folders.
Open the 33 MiB fat32 partition (mine is sdc1) in new window:
Copy the EFI & boot folders to the fat32 partition.
Open the ext4 partition (sdc2) created wid GParted in a new window:
Copy the porteux folder to the ext4 partition.
I’m the Root User on all my computers, so I edited the porteux.cfg file to bypass the other login options:
Open the fat32 partition (sdc1) window again – then boot > syslinux > porteux.cfg file. Scroll down to the LABEL graphical section and add login=root to either the APPEND line or the INITRD line. Most recommend adding it to the APPEND, but I went wid the INITRD line from habit – then save it.
That’s all there is to it. 🙂 Now you just boot the new PorteuX OS!
Post Setup
The PorteuX App Store is very handy – I used it for my browser ‘n Nvidia driver, but it offers more:
Click on the app you want ‘n The Store creates the module for you ‘n places it in correct folder.
To this point I have tested KDE stable, Gnome stable & current, Mate stable & current, xfce 4.18 current, and xfce 4.12 stable. All were fine—especially KDE stable & GNOME current, but I like a Cinnamon DE when I can get it. 🙂
For that Cinnamon ‘Feel‘ & look I added the Dash to Panel & ArcMenu GNOME Shell extensions:
My inxi module & perl module from Porteus 5 Cinnamon worked on PorteuX also, and here is the inxi -F info:
That is also showing the Nvidia driver for my GeForce 1660 GPU.
Here is the actual Nvidia System info:
Here is the About info:
Here is the ArcMenu:
Conclusion
Excellent job by the Developer/s on PorteuX!!!
The Porteus Forum came in handy for this review—fact is, it’s how I found out about PorteuX 0.3. It is sitting on the DistroWatch ‘waiting list‘ right now so not a lot of news or info about PorteuX is out ‘There. 😉
Also, post #64 by Ed_P on page 5 is how I discovered the info needed to add the Cinnamon DE to PorteuX 0.3. 👏👌👍🙂
Part 2 will be on how to add the Cinnamon DE.