Distributions

Porteus 1.0: A portable distribution for old-school KDE users

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.

Porteus is a distribution that was originally based on Slax, and is now based on Slackware Linux since Slax has gone without a release since 2009. Porteus developer Jay Flood says that Porteus started as "Slax Remix" with a 32-bit version only, then moved to an independent project with the name change to Porteus at the beginning of 2011. What's the philosophy for Porteus? In a word, speed. Flood says that the project's goals are "being lightweight (under 300Mb), super fast, portable and complete" and the project FAQ says that Porteus is for "anyone who likes an extremely fast and light operating system that boots in seconds, and stays up to date with the latest software and kernel versions."

Unlike many distributions, Porteus does not have a unified set of packages between its 32-bit and 64-bit releases. Instead, the 32-bit release offers KDE 3.5.12 or LXDE as its desktop, while KDE 4.x users will need to choose the 64-bit release. Why the difference? Flood says that the choice was made to optimize Porteus 32-bit for older hardware, and there's user demand for the prior KDE release. He also says that KDE 4.x is available for the 32-bit version, but not by default. LXDE is available for both releases.

Flood says that the project is also testing Trinity for the 64-bit release, but they haven't yet provided it publicly for users to try out. He did note that users can only run one version of KDE, as Porteus has compiled Trinity to run from the /usr directory unlike the upstream project, which is designed to sit alongside KDE 4.x.

Porteus is not currently doing any development on Trinity, though it is reporting bugs upstream. The Trinity project itself is currently frozen due to work on converting to using cmake. Should Trinity fall by the wayside, Flood says that Porteus would likely look to moving to Xfce or KDE4 for the 32-bit edition.

The distribution is meant to be run off of a CD, or off a USB flash drive. It can be copied to a hard drive, but the project recommends Slackware instead if the user wants to do a traditional installation that runs off a hard disk. The live CD also offers an option to set up a PXE boot server, so users could boot Porteus over the network as well.

To try out Porteus, I decided to go with the 32-bit release. It's been a while since I've sat down to a KDE 3.5 desktop, and I wanted to see how it compared with today's KDE. Porteus is using Trinity KDE 3.5.12, which was released in October of 2010. The last official release of KDE was 3.5.10, so Trinity has put out two releases since picking up the project. The 3.5.11 Trinity release added a number of new features, like SmartCard support for KDM, remote folder synchronization in Konqueror, and ICC color profile support. The 3.5.12 release had little in the way of major features but had a number of fixes for Kontact, changed the default to double-clicking for launching applications, and added features to make GTK applications fit in better on the KDE desktop.

For longtime KDE users, then, the Trinity desktop will look very familiar but contains no major improvements since the KDE project focused on the 4.x series. Which is not to say that it's aged poorly. Trinity KDE is perfectly usable, and very fast even with a limited amount of memory. I started testing Porteus in a VM with only 512MB of RAM (to better simulate older hardware), and found KDE very responsive and usable. With the RAM bumped up to 1GB and copying the entire live CD into RAM, I found Porteus extremely responsive for normal desktop use.

The application selection may be a bit limiting for some users. There's no LibreOffice/OpenOffice.org, GIMP, Inkscape, etc. Porteus does include KOffice (1.6) and the KDE PIM applications from the 3.5.x series. Firefox is already configured with Adobe Flash and the Flashblock Add-On.

If you want applications that aren't installed by default, Porteus uses a "module" system derived from Slax to install packages. These are much like Slackware packages, but they're an LZMA2-compressed squashfs filesystem, which provides a smaller download and allows modules to be unmounted from a live system. The project has some packages available for installation via a Porteus Package Manager, which is a serviceable if clunky utility for finding, downloading, and installing modules. Porteus also includes a utility to remove modules from a running system, so it's possible to conserve memory by (for example) removing the KOffice module.

Since Porteus is based on Slackware, you might expect to be able to install Slackware packages as well. This is possible, but with a few hurdles. Specifically, Porteus expects you to convert the packages into Porteus modules instead. The distribution does include tools to do this, and the steps are not particularly difficult — but tend to rule Porteus out for users who want to install a variety of software without too much hassle.

Naturally, Porteus has tools for saving configuration between reboots, and even tools for copying directories to USB or hard disk in case you want to preserve the files between reboots. One downside, though, is that the project doesn't really have an update system — beyond grabbing a new image at this time.

Most of the work that's gone into Porteus has been done, or led by, Flood and founder Tomasz Jokiel. The distribution also has a documentation team that has developed quite a few guides and tutorials for working with Porteus. Flood says that the distribution has a "friendly and active development community" and invites users to register on the Porteus forum and get involved.

In general, 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.

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Distribution quotes of the week

-- Philip Van Hoof

-- Juan Rodriguez announces Fedora remix BlueBubble

-- Juan Rodriguez

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Red Hat Enterprise MRG 2.0 released

Red Hat has announced the availability of version 2.0 of its Enterprise MRG ("messaging, realtime, and grid") distribution. It features an update to RHEL 6.1, a number of claimed performance improvements, and a bunch of buzzword-compliant cloud features. "Enterprise MRG Messaging 2.0 services as a foundational layer of infrastructure in Red Hat's OpenShift Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) solution, introduced in May 2011. With Enterprise MRG 2.0, OpenShift gains a reliable, scalable mechanism for transferring data in the cloud, as well as the interoperability of the AMQP open standard."

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Mageia: preview of ARM port is now available

Arnaud Patard has been working on an ARM port of Mageia, and the first technical preview is now available. "This first release has been built using Mageia tools but not integrated into the Mageia build system. This is one of the main items on the current todo list. A PandaBoard is waiting now to be installed in the Mageia build system so that a parallel build can be done in ARM when a package is submitted to the build system. The hard part will be managing different ARM machines using different socs meaning different kernels."

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Updated Debian 6.0.2 released

The Debian project has announced the first update of its stable distribution Debian 6.0 "Squeeze". "This update mainly adds corrections for security problems to the stable release, along with a few adjustments to serious problems."

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How YOU can help Debian!

Martin Zobel-Helas looks at how people might get involved in Debian's development process. "If you are using Debian, speak about it! If you have problems with Debian, speak about it! If you like Debian, speak about it. Read the debian-user mailing list (or a localized one) and jump in if users have the same problem you had, and help them. All sort of publicity will help Debian." (Thanks to Paul Wise)

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Bits from the Release Team

Neil McGovern has a report from the Debian Release Team, covering Release Team sprint minutes, Squeeze wrap up/retrospective, Release team membership/workload, Time based freezes, Migrations from unstable to testing, and what's in the next update.

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Multiarch in Debian unstable

Steve Langasek covers the current status of multiarch support in Debian. "People familiar with the FHS and with other Linux distributions probably know that they require amd64 libraries to be shipped in /lib64 instead of in /lib - a so-called "biarch" solution because it only scales to two architectures. Debian has never implemented this provision of the FHS for two reasons: first, because the package manager up to now has not had support for installing copies of a package for more than one architecture side by side, and second because accomodating /lib64 in Debian packaging is sufficiently intrusive that we've held out for a solution that would address more than just the 32+64-bit library case. Multiarch is the solution to the second problem, providing a policy for combining library packages from an arbitrary number of architectures on a single filesystem."

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Fedora 13 End of Life

This is a reminder that Fedora 13 has reached its end of life. There will be no further updates, including security updates.

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Appointment to the Fedora Board

Ruediger "Rudi" Landmann has been appointed to the Fedora Board for a full one-year cycle. "Rudi has been active on the Fedora Documentation team, and maintains several documentation-related packages in Fedora."

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Mageia: Security, Updates and More - Oh My!

The fledgling Mandriva fork, Mageia, has gotten their first release out the door. This report takes a look at the update process and progress. "If you've been using Mageia 1, you may have been wondering where all the updates are. It's customary to get quite a few updated packages in the first month or so of a new distribution to correct bugs and address security issues. Don't worry, we've been working on that too. As a new organization, and a community driven one, we first had to work out how to do the updates. While some of us have experience from previous lives, we weren't entirely satisfied with the old process and wanted to make sure our new community of users and packagers had an input into how we'll do things."

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Distribution newsletters

• Debian Project News (June 24)
• DistroWatch Weekly, Issue 411 (June 27)
• Fedora Weekly News Issue 279 (June 22)
• Maemo Weekly News (June 27)
• openSUSE Weekly News, Issue 181 (June 25)
• Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter, Issue 222 (June 25)

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The 2011 Linux Distro Scorecard (Linux.com)

Joe 'Zonker' Brockmeier has a brief review of his top 6 distribution picks; Debian, Fedora, Linux Mint, openSUSE, Slackware, and Ubuntu. "Which distribution is the best? None of them, or all of them. It's really about what meets your needs. Some people want a distribution that's really easy to use, and don't care much about licensing. Some people choose a distribution because of the licensing, and ease of use isn't really that important. You might only want to look at distributions that have KDE or GNOME as a desktop. It's sort of like picking a restaurant, what makes one person happy is going to be a really bad experience for another person. I like spicy food, other folks can't handle it or just don't like it."

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