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Portable Linux p.2 (Responces Welcome)

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dark_yux
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Last seen: 10 years 3 months ago
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Portable Linux p.2 (Responces Welcome)

Dear Portable Developers:

I have possibly tried all of the portable linuxes out there under QEMU and there are some issues that anyone who wants to create a portable linux should keep in mind:
1.) SPEED- Slax, Puppuy and Pendrive are unbareably slow when it comes to opperating in an "emu." If you want the program to be more than a novelty it has to opperate at or near native speed.
2.) TRUE PESISTANCE- it should not be a pain to save your settings. DSL and Puppy are the culprits here I really don't like to constantly repeat the same setup based tasks over and over as well as formating my drive to save (cough, cough, DSL). For shear eaze of use it should opperate like Persistant Pendrive Slax and be able to save some of its settings (witout being slow like PP Slax).
3.) CUSTOMISEABLE- I know that adding package after package can defeat the purpose of being a "lean mean fighting machine" but if you want to why not? Which leads to...
4.) UNIVERSAL- Having to deal with DSL and Puppy made me realize that having to deal with specialized packages was not fun. ".pup",".deb" (w/DSL), and ".abcdefg" especally when they don't work causes headaches that are part of the reason why I don't use portable Linuxes today. If possible please make it work with the "core binaries" (if I am using the right terminology), in other words what the program provider puts on their web site instead of putting whatever you compile to work with your os and making it totally reliant on "community customization" and what ever the community decides they want to add irrespective to someone's needs or desires.

Thank You,

Dark Yux

José Pedro Arvela
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I agree in some details

I agree with you in some things, but...

  1. SPEED - The problem is that QEMU is the most used emulator and the lighter (maybe) known. The only way to have QEMU faster is to install Kqemu that needs admin rights and is really unstable. DSL and Puppy are as fast as they can be. If you want something faster, then use only the command line (although a custom kernel with the only needed things for QEMU could be made for performance improvements).
  2. TRUE PERSISTENCE - I agree!
  3. CUSTOMIZABLE - Agree, not to have packages installed but to be able to easily install others.
  4. UNIVERSAL - True, Puppy is a pain for packages, and DSL offers almost nothing. The OSes should be made compatible with most Debian Distros (example: Xubuntu is relatively light and has same repos from Ubuntu).

Blue is everything.

dark_yux
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Ok....

Sorry for the late reply!!! Could you expound on that Debian thing.

[Double post removed by moderator SL]

self.path = path if self.path == None else self.path

José Pedro Arvela
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Well...

Debian and Debian based distros are some of the major Linux Distributions used and have a lot of acceptance worldwide. Those use the apt/aptitude/... package manager that uses deb files. Most of these packages made for Debian work on any Debian based distros (for example: Ubuntu). Although Debian based distros aren't usually light, but it is possible to make a light distro. Most of those distros use Synaptic Package Manager for managing installed packages. That manager is user friendly. Normally Debian based distros have a lot of software on their repositories, including proprietary software sometimes.

A small debian based distro (maybe) is Xubuntu (and even that way it is heavy) that is an fork of Ubuntu, therefore, it uses Ubuntu repos and is really user friendly. Also, it comes with almost none user app beyond... Firefox Biggrin Evolution, Synaptic, XFCE Desktop Environment, but even like that, heavier that most other small distros.

(I already ran Xubuntu 7.04 from QEMU on 512Mb RAM on Linux and it ran pretty fine)

Blue is everything.

dark_yux
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OK

But is there a way to make it universal so that we could use packages built for any distro.

self.path = path if self.path == None else self.path

José Pedro Arvela
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Not sure...

I've heard somewhere of an universal package manager that can install a package from almost any distro (deb, rpm...) but I'm not sure how it works neither if it is ready for the masses already... I would advice you to stick with an highly used distro (Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora [maybe]...) and use the almost always present packages for that distro.

And don't forget: most Linux distros and apps are created by the community and not companies.

Blue is everything.

dark_yux
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Great

If your trying to build a personal computer, linux only and for everyday use, what "distro" would you use and why? I turned this question into another post.
www.portableapps.com/node/10968

self.path = path if self.path == None else self.path

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