A Brief Review of Porteus Linux

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The Porteus website says Porteus is a very light-weight, fast, and portable Linux distribution that is designed to run on new and old computers. It can also be loaded completely into RAM to make it run even faster. If you run it from your computer's internal hard drive, Porteus is designed to be installed as a "frugal" installation, which means it runs from compressed files, not from a file system with the usual Linux directory structure. However, after installing on a hard drive, SSD, or USB flash drive and booting it, you see what looks like the usual Linux directory structure. I expect this may be confusing at first to those who are unfamiliar with this type of operating system. Running everything from compressed files makes the process of adding software different than for the typical Linux distribution. Additional applications are added as pre-compiled packages in compressed modules. And apparently, you can create your own modules (at least, sometimes).

Porteus can supposedly be booted in seven different ways (I only tried the first): On the desktop with saved changes On the desktop without saved changes, rootcopy, or magic folders By loading it into RAM Without a GUI, command line only On other computers over a network The "PLoP BootManager - allows you to boot from many kinds of devices, even some from which your BIOS may not support booting." Boot another operating system on another hard drive (i.e. dual-boot mode) (when manually installing Porteus in such a way as to support it).

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