Home

Feature List for Porteus Desktop Edition

Porteus is a small (under 300MB) portable linux distribution based on Slackware linux and a heavily modified version of the linux-live scripts. It is modular in design, meaning programs (or collections of programs) can be installed and removed simply by double clicking on module files.  Unlike other Linux distributions that have a 'live CD' option, or can be shoehorned onto a flash drive, 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). With it's small footprint, modest system requirements, wifi support and modern kernel, Porteus is also ideally suited to run on netbooks.

Porteus is available for both 32-bit and 64-bit architectures and offers a number of desktops you can choose from.  Please use our web wizard to create your unique build with personalized settings and additional modules included. On a modern system, Porteus will boot up, create it's live filesystem, and be up and running KDE in 30 to 60 seconds when run from a flash or hard drive. If you select Razor, LXDE or Xfce, you will be up and running even sooner. Go here to see a video of Porteus booting to LXDE in 15 seconds!

Features:

Lightning-fast boot time
Can be run from USB Flash drives, CDROM's, DVDROM's, hard disks, flash card devices, or just about any device you can get your PC to boot from!
LZMA2 (xz) compression for modules
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
Support for dozens of languages
A dependency-resolving package manager written just for Porteus, with built-in access to 5 slackware repositories.
Porteus-specific scripts for creating and manipulating modules, network configuration (wifi included), language selection, and much more
Updated installers for linux and windows
"Porteus Settings Centre" which serves as a central location for updating, installing, managing settings, viewing system information, and much more!

Default Boot options (Standard Editions*):

Graphical Desktop Environment (KDE4, LXQT, MATE, or XFCE) with Saved Changes, autoconfigure xorg
Always Fresh, boots to a desktop without saved changes, rootcopy or magic folders; autoconfigure xorg
Copy2RAM, boots to a desktop without saved changes, all modules copied to RAM; autoconfigure xorg
Text Mode (boot to command line)
PXE Boot (run as usual, but start Porteus as a PXE server, allowing you to boot other computers over the network)
PLoP BootManager - allows you to boot from many kinds of devices, even some from which your BIOS may not support booting.
Boot from first hard drive - attempts to boot an operating system that resides on the first hard drive, such as Windows.

System Requirements: