Trying a Linux distro, located fully on a USB, called Porteus
TAGS: software; Linux Porteus; USB operating system
Why I Did This
I recently learned about Linux distros that be held on small USB sticks so that you can boot them from most computers (through the BIOS boot menus), and I wanted to try them out. They are small sized packages (like half a gig, so they can fit on even the really cheap small USBs), and they have the ability to save things to their USB storage.
The Porteus desktop screen with built in apps.
Design Walkthrough
Parts:some computer, USB stick, Linux distro Porteus
I found quite a few different Linux distros that could do this, but Porteus seemed to be well renowned and worked right away (I also had Puppy Linux but it wasn’t working for me, but I suspect it was because of the USB stick). I downloaded the Porteus distro and flashed it to the USB stick, then while the computer was booting up I pressed F12 to get to the boot menu, and selected the USB stick (or changed the device boot order to have USB first). The Porteus desktop showed up in place of the regular desktop screen.
Lessons Learned
Why would I ever use this?
I’m not sure yet. It works like the user profiles on a server
network, but as a desktop profile. Maybe if I had some servers or programs setup on the
Porteus system that I wanted to run and it could be from any computer, but I’m not sure yet
the scenario need for that. It’s very neat though.
From what I read online, it could be used as a working OS for dead/bricked OS / computers so
as to check or reformat the hard drives; maybe this is the solution for Linux computers,
because I know that Windows has OS recovery tools on USB sticks that probably work in the
same way (albeit they aren’t functional desktops, but just recovery tools).
References
Porteus info page: http://www.porteus.org/info/features.html
Forum discussing Porteus uses: https://forum.porteus.org/viewtopic.php?f=48&p=97478