Porteus is a portable operating system based on Slackware
After just over a year after the previous launch, the new version of the Linux distribution «Porteus 5.01», which is built on the basis of Slackware Linux packages.
Porteus It has two editions, one of them the desktop edition (which we are talking about in this article) and the other is the Porteus Kiosk edition (of which releases have already been shared here on the blog). The difference between these two editions is that Porteus Kiosk only offers the user the ability to interact with the web browser (Firefox) and blocks the user from any other action.
About Porteus (Desktop)
The Porteus desktop edition, It is one of the few distributions of “current” Linux that is designed with low-resource teams in mind, That is, it is designed for minimal resource consumption, which allows you to use Porteus on obsolete equipment.
The system interface is designed according to the possibility of use on devices with low resolution of screen. For configuration, the Porteus Settings Center configurator is used. The distribution is loaded from a compressed FS image, but all changes made during operation (browser history, bookmarks, downloaded files, etc.) can be saved separately to a USB drive or hard drive. When loaded in 'Always Fresh' mode, changes are not saved.
Additional applications are distributed in the form of modules and to manage packages, it uses its own PPM package manager, which takes into account dependencies and allows installing programs from the Porteus, Slackware and Slackbuilds.org repositories.
Main new features of Porteus 5.01
The new version of Porteus 5.01 arrives with based on Slackware 15.0 patch repository as of September 21, 2023, while the heart of the system offers the Linux kernel 6.5.5.
Another novelty that accompanies this new release is that for the x86_64 edition of Porteus, sand added a new edition with the LXQt desktop environment, With which the distribution increases its desktop options to 8 and thus joining the family along with the editions of Xfce, Cinnamon, GNOME, KDE, LXDE, LXQt, MATE and OpenBox.
In addition to this, it is also highlighted that the convertz script which has as its function the convert a directory of xz compressed modules to zstd compressed modules.
On the part of the system package we can find that proprietary drivers are offered NVIDIA 535 and 470 pre-designed (with multilib support) and in which there is already support for RTX 3070 and 3080 graphics, as well as various support improvements for Wayland, support improvements for Vulkan, performance and more.
Of the other changes that stand out from this new version:
- Perl has been moved to 05-devel
- Slackware package managers include: slapt-get and slackpkg (in core) and slpkg
- A simple wrapper for slapt-get: slapt-mod – to produce a module from the package
- Sysvinit Static Binary Updated to 3.07
- Updated the built-in package management FAQ documents.
- BusyBox in initrd was updated to 1.36.1, along with the other libraries and containers.
- The xcb utility stack was moved to 002-xorg, for compatibility with VirtualBox and smoother use of the qt5 module with non-qt DEs.
- MPV media player updated to v0.36.0.
- New boot provided by Blaze.
Lxqt updated to latest version. - Small changes to the interface, for example. kde: Dolphin has better filesystem navigation defaults
- New update script: update-onlyoffice for OnlyOffice office suite
Finally if you are iInterested in learning more about it, you can check the details in the following link
Download and get Porteus 5.01
For those interested in being able to obtain a system image, as mentioned above, compilations are offered with the Xfce, Cinnamon, GNOME, KDE, LXDE, LXQt, MATE and OpenBox user environments of approximately 380 MB in size, compiled for i586 and x86_64 architectures.