What is Reddit's opinion of Porteus?

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I keep an install of Porteus on the USB stick on my keychain. It doesn't require you to use the whole USB stick for it, so you can have other stuff on there like a regular stick, and it's designed to be used that way.

You can, but it is a bit tricky since Windows doesn't have built-in support for "Linux-ish" filesystems.

This link details some ways to do it under Windows. If you plan to keep tinkering with Linux on your raspberry pi, it could be a good idea to at least keep a portable Linux distro on a USB somewhere.

You can start out by trying Porteus, a ~175 MB distro that runs straight from a USB stick. This allows you to use Linux on your Windows computer without installing anything, and should help you in restoring your files.

Good luck!

I was wondering about the same thing -- a minimal Linux environment in which to build packages from pkgsrc. Please keep us (at least me) up to date on your progress.

Perhaps consider Porteus? It's designed to be a LiveCD, but it can be installed to a hard drive. If all you're wanting to do is build with pkgsrc, I'd think it might work well.

Also, I wonder if Salix might work for you. You said Slackware is not what you're looking for, and Salix is a Slackware derivative. But, it does have a "core" install target, which might be minimal enough for your needs.

man, just use a live os. download porteus. (you can use any linux os). install it on a thumb drive or burn it to a cd.

whenever you use it it will create a new environment. nothing is saved on the computer. so if you need to just get on the internet or whatever, it should be safe.

Either Porteus, which is exactly what you asked for and works really well with stone-age computers, but slackware based and therefore a little bit different to the more common debian based distributions.

Or something light from the *buntus (Lubuntu, Xubuntu maybe Ubuntu Mate) and use Universal USB Installer on Windows, while setting the "persistence" option. This way you have a more common distribution (better to troubleshoot), which is fully portable and can boot also on other machines.

Mini-Tip: You can use one of those miniature usb drives, so that basically only a tiny bump on one of the USB ports is visible. That way the laptop still fits in those carrier bags...

Porteus (here)

(for the paranoid, the download servers communicate over plain HTTP)

It is designed as a USB bootable OS from the start

If you want to install it, download both the desired ISO file and the required modules(libreoffice, chromium, etc), unpack the ISO file and put the modules in their dedicated directory, and then run the boot script (beware of this script as it often changed ownership of my home folder (on version 3.22 I think))

>The Wi-fi [...] would stop working after about 30 minutes from turning my laptop on

That's an important piece of information - it would seem to indicate a hardware problem, rather than a software problem.

You can decisively rule out it being a software problem if you boot from a different OS where the Wifi should work. I recommend Porteus for a USB-based Linux distro. If you're more comfortable troubleshooting in Windows, you can use ReactOS for free.

Porteus is an excellent portable distro. Take a look here http://www.porteus.org/info/features.html. According to their page "Porteus is designed and optimized to run from a USB flash drive, flash card or CD. It can also be installed in it's compressed form to an external or internal hard disk (AKA a 'frugal' install)." Also "Changes to the system (customization, downloaded files, browser history and favorites, etc) can be saved persistently to your USB or hard drive, or you can boot into 'Always Fresh' mode, and no changes to your system will be saved anywhere"

I actually linked the photo in my last comment, but here you go again - http://i.imgur.com/1EUf2hW.png

I'm using Porteus. I'll try accessing Spotify's web player again using Chrome 43 and let you know what gives

EDIT: I misread. When I try Spotify with Adobe flash ENABLED, "Shockwave Flash has crashed" is the only error I get, nothing else.

Ubuntu has been fairly large since around 2010, when they started adding in the ability to download third-party codecs and software upon install.

As for a lightweight installation, I recommend trying out Porteus. It seems to be geared toward exactly what you're doing. Portability.

However, I would personally recommend that you install directly onto a flash drive and boot your Linux distro of choice from it on the bare steel. This will offer better performance in the long run, and allow you to do your development on any machine that supports USB booting. It also completely separates your development from your personal machine, which is what it sounds like your primary aim is.

You can do this most easily by unplugging all hard drives from any machine, plugging in the flash drive, booting the CD of the OS of your choice, and then choosing to install to the flash drive as if it were a hard drive. This creates a full installation that can go anywhere you do, and you can do this with any Linux distribution(Even the fairly large ones).

This can be done but all distros that I know of that are purpose meant for this are not that feature rich and/or lack a variety of software that can be easily installed. Most any software can be installed but, you will likely have to compile it yourself. Most other distros can be run this way but, though a kind of hack. The OS is stored as if it were on a DVD with a separate file acting as a fake hard drive to save stuff on. You can't install new software and updates but if the distro has what you need out of the box it doesn't matter.

That being said the two distros below are great and may suit your needs quite well.

I have an old laptop without a hard drive and use Porteus on an 8GiB thumb drive to still run it. The laptop old and slow and this is a lightweight distro with the proper wireless drivers built in so it is best in my case.

Porteus is not the most software rich Linux distro but, it is not the only one with this use case in mind.

Slax is also an exelent distro meant to be run from USB. Slax also has a small but nice library of programs that can be added on easily.

Like /u/zephyrtech said the LinuxLive USB creator can make a live USB of many distros. Ubuntu based ones being able to have a persistence file to save things in.

You might want to look at Porteus, it is designed for that purpose. A bit hard to set up the initial save function, but persistence is possible. Read then ask questions if needed. http://www.porteus.org/ ..... http://forum.porteus.org/

Keep in mind, a standard distro installed on an USB stick is likely to work like crap (speaking from experience). Especially if it's an older USB stick and/or USB port.

I'd check out Porteus. It was designed to be completely portable and run on removable media such as a USB stick or CD. You can download it here: http://www6.frugalware.org/mirrors/linux/porteus/x86_64/Porteus-v5.0/

(I'd recommend KDE or XFCE environments, unless your PC is completely ancient, then try Openbox).

Some tutorials: http://www.porteus.org/info/tutorials.html

2yo article about installing and using Porteus: https://fitzcarraldoblog.wordpress.com/2019/11/22/porteus-linux-a-portable-linux-with-a-difference/

Porteus is Slackware-based, so it's not nearly as straight-forward and user-friendly as Ubuntu-based distros (or even Arch-based Manjaro), but sadly I can't think of a modern user-friendly distro that would fit and run well on a 8GB stick.

Almost any linux distro comes with a persistent storage option. If you want to go for Puppy Linux format your USB drive to Ext* and use the savefolder option. You can also use Porteus based on Slackware, for which you need to create a container...

"can't" definitely isn't true. You can install any distro to a USB drive, with grub or syslinux. It may not be directly supported by your distro's LiveCD installer, which means you may have to do a lot of things yourself. When they say it hasn't been possible for a long time, they are likely referring to EFI. But you can see the boot entry for your LiveCD, and there's no reason you couldn't set that up for a persistent USB distro.

As for graphics drivers, that is also totally possible. The LiveCD works with pretty much any PC you plug it into, right? The LiveCD is running the Linux kernel and graphics stack you can get from the repos. No reason why you couldn't set that up.

So, yes, you could. Now, should you? That is a tough question to answer. You may be better off using a distro which is designed for USB storage, like Porteus and Slax. They both use a slow-compress/fast-decompress root filesystem for maximum read performance. This does mean it can be an ordeal to add new packages (Slax guide | Porteus guide). However, these distros provide standard persistence as well if you need a package or file for just one session.

If you're thinking long term: Running from a portable disk usually means your bottleneck is the disk IO rate. There are a couple of distros which specialize in trying to solve that: Slax and Porteus. Both of these distros store their base data in squashfs modules, which are compressed. The compression is fast to strike a balance between disk IO and CPU usage.

Slax has a guide for installing new modules, the steps would be similar for Porteus.

SliTaz is usually a safe bet, especially on limited hardware.

Porteus for better hardware specs

Others will probably suggest KNOPPIX....tried once, a bunch of unneeded bloatware, at least from my point of view

Well I managed to get it running with Linux Mint and 4GB persistence. While definitly working, I am not sure if this is the optimal solution. Just feels hacky to use an image meant to only exist for installation and then just run it with some added persistence.

I initially was hoping for some Linux designed to be portable (like porteus http://www.porteus.org) that could also deal with secure boot.

Porteus is designed to be contained entirely on a USB stick. There's a (very) small learning curve where you have to create persistent storage on it (once you're booted and running), but it's pretty simple and there's a good reason it doesn't just do that automatically.

Porteus is made to run off a USB stick. It doesn't come with persistent storage right away, you have to configure it yourself, but there is good reason for that, which you'll learn if you choose to set it up. Overall a really nice distro for running off USB.

Porteus! It's been designed from the start to be run from a USB stick, and save changes into a special folder on the USB drive.

You install new software packages by adding packages to a directory on the USB stick, which then get transparently integrated into the filesystem on boot.

> So were going to compare a consumer level OS designed for use on every conceivable consumer PC to OS distros that are feature incomplete upon install

Are we gonna go with the minimum system requirements with windows. Of course you can get windows run in a couple GB, but its not very pleasant.

And no, GNU/Linux runs on "ever conceivable customer PC" not windows.

Many architectures windows doesn't even support, or is very lacking.

And no, The Debian one was a complete install, it even includes games.

The tiny core was the only ultra minimum, which is in response to you going base line on windows. Windows isn't gonna be a fun time with such a minimal system. Nor would tinycore. http://www.porteus.org/ however would be a contender for that.