(old)Puppy Linux Discussion Forum

Porteus looks cool but no real lite DE done yet - kde.
someone is working on an openbox and xfce porteus but i don't know how polished it is?
And its not for full hard drive installs

been trying to install an lite slackware but not doing so well - easy if you go for the full kde.
too bad there wasn't an updated amigo linux.
no luck with absolute linux - my isp keeps screwing it up the download or the cheap CDR ?

Porteus has pburn (download package) which is cool

harii4 wrote:Porteus looks cool but no real lite DE done yet - kde.
someone is working on an openbox and xfce porteus but i don't know how polished it is?

For what it's worth, lxde is included as well... at least on the 32 bit version.Lots lighter than kde.

Porteus as root......

Thanks James, yes your code worked well. I also got into root and could do
anything I can in Puppy as far as I tested.

Now I need to make the special slaxsave.dat file thing and place it in the right place. I failed at that last time I tested Porteus on the other acer machine.

This one despite being totally new warned me that I should add fsck to the kernel line. I use gru4dos and that one seems compatible with your grub legacy code.

Why does Slax varieties allow us to boot this way but not Suse or Fedora or
Gento or Mageia or Arch not even PCLinux does it despite them saying them
are so user friendly? To not even allow frugal boot how friendly is that?

James C wrote:

harii4 wrote:Porteus looks cool but no real lite DE done yet - kde.
someone is working on an openbox and xfce porteus but i don't know how polished it is?

For what it's worth, lxde is included as well... at least on the 32 bit version.Lots lighter than kde.

I think I tested this on the other machine and failed to boot it using LXDE in the code. One should use lxde with small chars? I need to test it now

How does one know if one are in Kde or LXDE?

I seems to have both Kde and Lxde and Trinity at same time.
I am not computer savvy enough to get what is going on.

It does not remember that I set it to swedish it is still US keyboard. But it does remember what startpage I want

So some things it remembers and some it does not remember. /smile?

I've just tested the new version of PCLinuxOS 12.1 "Phoenix" (the XFCE version). I was less than impressed with an earlier version of PCLinuxOS I tried a couple of years back but this one looks like a solid release. The only downside is that it doesn't come with an office suite included in the live version; you get an installer for Libre Office instead which you have to use to download and then install it. Otherwise it definitely merits a recommendation.

The maybe expected downside is that for us who love to do frugal install
on NTFS then this distro is not so easy to get going despite them claim
to me user friendly. Obviously they don't see frugal install as user friendly?

Now it can be my lack of knowledge but do they explain how to boot it
on NTFS using grub4dos menu.lst somewhere?
http://distrowatch.com/table.php?distribution=pclinuxos

PCLinuxOS is a user-friendly Linux distribution

Now I am different but to not have frugal install on NTFS
spells extremely unfriendly attitude to some 90% of all computer
owners but that is only my subjective view.
http://www.pclinuxos.com/

For frugal install of Pclinu please see herehttp://www.pclinuxos.com/forum/index.ph ... 168.0.html

bignono1 wrote:For frugal install of Pclinux please see here http://www.pclinuxos.com/forum/index.ph ... 168.0.html

Yes but that works because he use ext4 I am on NTFS

Notice that I have used ext4 and LABEL=PoorMan

I tested PCLOS using another code and it told me it failed to do the loop thing.

Words always get interpreted by at least two persons. The writer and the reader.

To force the reader to format a harddisk is not to be user friendly in my world.
Some 90% of all computers are NTFS so they can only be formatted
to something else if one are good at computers. To me user friendly is like
puppy or porteus which don't require that one format or do partitions.

I have just tested porteus 1.2RC and it worked in frugal install on NTFS
and even made a save file on it.

title Porteus w/changes
root (hd0,1)
kernel (hd0,1)/porteusboot/vmlinuz from_dir=porteus/ ramsize=60% root=/dev/ram0 rw fsck lxde kmap=se changes=/mnt/sda2/porteus12rc-slax.dat
initrd (hd0,1)/porteusboot/initrd.xz
boot

nooby wrote: To force the reader to format a harddisk is not to be user friendly in my world.
Some 90% of all computers are NTFS so they can only be formatted
to something else if one are good at computers. To me user friendly is like
puppy or porteus which don't require that one format or do partitions.

Nobody is forcing anyone to format a harddisk..... anyone can format or not.... their choice.Anyone can choose to use a distro or not.
I can assure you that a lot of, if not most Linux users are not really interested in trying to boot from an NTFS partition which is why most developers aren't interested either.
You are free to try anything you want but you are going against the mainstream of Linux development in trying something there is no real interest in officially supporting.But, as long as you're having fun....go for it.

Slitaz are at it again.
http://distrowatch.com/?newsid=07127

slitaz-4.0-RC1.iso (34.0MB

only 34mb how is that possible? Can somebody boot
it and tell if you like it. I will try to do frugal but I don't feel
very confident. I am on a new computer and don't have
my old menu.lst to look at for suggestions.
I failed with this version. They have changed the script so
one have to include locale and kmap and it also failed with
rootfs3.gz and 2 and 1 only rootfs4.gz worked but failed to get
startx going. Maybe one should have startxwm or some other such?

I am too lazy to give it more time. I will use the 3.0 instead of 4.0
I tried these codes

title SliTaz vmlinuz-2.6.37-slitaz
root (hd0,1)
kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.37-slitaz root=/dev/null rw lang=en_US kmap=fi-latin1
initrd /boot/rootfs4.gz

title Slitaz 4RC vmlinuz-2.6.37-slitaz usernam root psw root
find --set-root --ignore-floppies /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.37-slitaz
kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.37-slitaz rw root=/dev/null home=sda2 lang=en_US kmap=fi-latin1 vga=791 screen=1024x768x24
initrd /boot/rootfs4.gz

title SliTaz 4RC
kernel (hd0,1)/boot/vmlinuz-2.6.37-slitaz rw root=/dev/null slitaz vga=791 lang=en_US kmap=fi-latin1 nosmp acpi=off
initrd (hd0,1)/boot/rootfs4.gz, /boot/rootfs3.gz, /boot/rootfs2.gz,/boot/rootfs1.gz,

and also these with all /boot/rootfs4.gz, 3 2 1 or only with /boot/rootfs4.gz,
and with only /boot/rootfs4.gz, where the only one that booted at all
but it ended up with a commandline as root becaue I booted with
root root but have no idea how one get the windows manager going

title SliTaz vmlinuz-2.6.37-slitaz
root (hd0,1)
kernel /boot/bzImage root=/dev/null rw lang=en_US kmap=fi-latin1
initrd /boot/rootfs4.gz

title Slitaz 4RC vmlinuz-2.6.37-slitaz usernam root psw root
find --set-root --ignore-floppies /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.37-slitaz
kernel /boot/bzImage rw root=/dev/null home=sda2 lang=en_US kmap=fi-latin1 vga=791 screen=1024x768x24
initrd /boot/rootfs4.gz

title SliTaz 4RC
kernel (hd0,1)/boot/bzImage rw root=/dev/null slitaz vga=791 lang=en_US kmap=fi-latin1 nosmp acpi=off
initrd (hd0,1)/boot/rootfs4.gz

I also tried with autologin and without like above.

I have looked in their forum but found not help there.

root=/dev/null corrected. still not booting so I give up on slitaz 4
Slitas 3 booted same code but failed internet on Acer D255 but managed to
get internet on D250

nooby wrote:title SliTaz 4RC
kernel (hd0,1)/boot/bzImage rw root=/dev/null slitaz vga=791 lang=en_US kmap=fi-latin1 nosmp acpi=off
initrd (hd0,1)/boot/rootfs4.gz

That's a very interesting boot-parameter!
/MHHP

Yes sorry I should ahve corrected that one here on the thread.

I saw it after some trial and error but it still failed to get windows manager
to start.

I tested the old version 3.0 and that one booted but failed to get internet LAN.

So I give up on Slitaz.

nooby wrote: only 34mb how is that possible?

I think that the most basic version of "tiny Core" is about 10Mb

http://www.youtube.com/user/sneekylinux ... d0aDvD_Jd8

yes they have 11 or 12 now? But MicroCore is even less.

But Slitaz has very many applications which TinyCore has not.

Latest Slitaz running live.It works. Still don't like Midori though.

nooby wrote: only 34mb how is that possible?

Both Slitaz and Tiny Core leave out a majority of the drivers that Puppy includes.And almost no applications by default while what is included is as small as possible.
By the time enough stuff is added to Slitaz or Tiny Core to be useful, to me anyway, you end up with something about the same size as a Puppy install.

Some thoughts on ntfs and linux

ntfs-3g is the software which mounts an ntfs partition. It is very useful for accessing your windows ntfs partition[s]. I have not had an issue after many years of use.

As for booting from ntfs, this is fraught with peril.

As with any system, when you install a file in ntfs (or FAT) it takes up as many blocks as it needs. Then you install another file and it takes up the next available block[s]. If you add to the first file then it takes up the next block[s]. This then makes the first file non-contiguous or fragmented in it's simplest form. This goes on and on and can happen very quickly.

So, this brings the possibility that when installing a linux system to ntfs that it could be all over the place unless you defragment your windows partition immediately before installing linux. If you have varying persistent storage you can see how this can compound the issue.

In the interest of stability, this is why I would not boot from ntfs, except for experimentation.

YMMV

If you wonder why Tiny Core and SlitaZ are so small, there are two main reasons:
- Lack of drivers - all huge drivers are separate packages; hardware support is bad because of this. If 99% of users install those drivers, you can count the package size as part of the ISO size.
- Use of the old XFree86, the X server implementation before X.Org. It's extremely small, but lacks any support for today's hardware or hardware acceleration (3D n' stuff). You can get it below 1 MB compressed easily, but there is a chance you won't be able to use it on architectures other than x86 and it's totally abandoned (e.g there's no development of this deceased project). No matter what you want to do with your machine - you'll probably need to install the full X.Org (which is several tenths of MB), especially if you want decent performance ... and you do.

To sum it up - tiny size means nothing. The best way to achieve this is removal of crucial features and separation of crucial components into add-on packages.

I see this as a bad idea, since it confuses users and makes installation harder. Moreover, it is nothing but lying to users. That's simply cruel.

EDIT: forgot to mention, as much as I know it's impossible to build XFree86 with today's GCC - TinyCore uses a binary package built on an old version and the SlitaZ documentation says they use the official static binary.

oops, I had no idea that casual remark or "Question" would get that many
answers. Thanks anyway.

I agree about the bad things with booting from ntfs.
I am rich enough to have the money to buy computers
that I can dedicate to be only for linux but that is not
what every owner of a computer can do.

And if 90% of all home computers are dependent on Microsoft
windows to do upgrade of smart phones and you only have
one computer and no money to buy even used such...

I may be an exception but I like the simple way Puppy boot
on NTFS so I would want every Linux distro to allow this too
without a need to do partition and formatting.

Okay do see it as an experiment if that makes it easier to stomach.

I see it as a KISS Keep it Simple Strategy If it works then it works.