Porteus be free anywhere

As you might expect there are few considerable incentives to use Porteus as your DevEnv:

• It is portable;
• It might be launched on any host;
• It is a lightweight version of Linux;
• It might be loaded directly into RAM (!)

Of course it is not a silver bullet, but sometimes it is useful to utilize its peculiar advantages.

This article might shed a light on a much attractive Porteus' feature: its capability to load into RAM of your PC when all data on your HDD stay detached. It might be defined as completely non-intrusive installation of UNIX OS.

There is an abundance of similar by main features live-USB Linux distributions, but the Load to RAM is a killer one:

• OS allocates in RAM, thus:
  • it allows to do all what you want to do on incredible speed;
  • it prevents USB-stick damage by writing incremental changes;
  • it grants you permission to modify it manually.

As an opposite experience I have had Ubuntu USB-stick which was similar by functionality and it was completely ruined after ~70 PC's boot-ing. Seems like incremental changes writing demolished it. And in addition it is unavoidable there.

Suppose it is enough to ensure you to make your own Porteus live-USB and take a challenge of total portability.

Porteus saves incremental changes in .xzm format.

# save-changes /mnt/sdc1/porteus/optional/extension_001.xzm

Where /mnt/sdc1/porteus/optional/ is a path to your Porteus Live-USB, and extension_001.xzm is a filename itself.

# nano /mnt/sdc1/boot/syslinux/porteus.cfg