14 DAY TRIAL // Porteus is a portable Linux distro that can run from a USB device, CD ROM, SD card, or hard drive, and is using Slackware as its base. The developers have released a new upgrade for it and they have updated a number of core packages.
Many distributions can be considered portable, but Porteus is built a little bit differently. The fact that it uses Slackaware allows users and developers alike to add modules for everything they need, without breaking the entire operating system. The fact that it's portable allows users to run it from virtually any kind of medium, not just hard disks. It's also worth noting that the system is also very small, which means that it needs very few hardware resources to load and function.
Users will notice that there is no package manager in this distribution and everything works by installing modules. It might seem a little bit complicated, but any installation is done with a double click of the proper package. Nothing could be easier than that.
Porteus Desktop Edition is living on the bleeding edge
There aren't too many distros that dare to get all the latest packages, especially because this usually means that stuff is not tested enough. It doesn't seem to be the case with Porteus, which acts like a very stable version, with very few issues. Distros that use older packages don't achieve this kind of stability, so it's quite nice to see that some people do like a challenge.
"The option to load Porteus into RAM results in a freakishly fast system that has almost all the functionality of a fully fledged Slackware install and twice the speed. Even when Porteus is loaded from a flash device or locally from your hard drive it is still very speedy -- you are ready to go only 25 seconds (depending on system specifications) after pushing the power button."
"The porteus community was delighted to find that Santa had dropped into our chimney a little early this year and left a shiny new Porteus Desktop Edition 3.1, as well as Porteus Kiosk Edition 3.2.0! A major change in the new desktop edition is the inclusion of the new LXQt desktop which replaces both RazorQT and LXDE. We would like to give a big thank you to our community for helping to reach our hosting targets which ensure the continued development of Porteus," reads the official announcement.
The dev also said that the Linux kernel has been updated to version 3.17.4, the installer has been fixed, the KDE desktop has been updated to version 4.14.3 (the last one in the series), LXQT has been updated to version 0.8.0, and MATE is now at version 1.9.1 (most advanced of any project).
A complete list of changes can be found in the official announcement. You can download Porteus 3.2.0 ISO from Softpedia.
