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HOWTO - Installing Porteus from both Windows and Linux

Porteus – The most portible distribution you will ever use.

Hello, I am going to guide you through the install version 1.1 of the Porteus Linux distribution. A light weight (under 300megs), fast and modular distribution based on Slackware.

We will start by downloading the image we need, These images can be downloaded here: http://porteus.org/distro-download/main-download.html

If you do not know which to choose the 32-bit image is the safer choice.

Both versions of Porteus come with two different desktop Environments. 32-Bit users will receive LXDE and Trinity – A KDE 3.5 Fork. 64-Bit users will receive LXDE and a stripped down version of KDE 4.

There are many different ways to install porteus, you can run a CD installer or copy the data over yourself. I am covering the simplest method, Copy the data where you need it and then set it to boot.

After you have downloaded your CD image you want to mount it. In windows this can be done with a free tool such as magiciso . In linux you can simply use the mount command in a terminal to mount the CD image, This should be done as the root user of your current linux distribution.

Choose a mount location and create it. I used the /mnt/tmp directory.
mkdir -p /mnt/tmp;

Mount the drive at that location.
#32-bit ISO.
mount -o loop /home/guest/Downloads/Porteus-v1.1-i486.iso /mnt/tmp/;
#64-bit ISO.
mount -o loop /home/guest/Downloads/Porteus-v1.1-x86_64.iso /mnt/tmp/;

I’ve chosen to install porteus to a usb flash drive. You can run porteus from any drive available, even a windows drive with a bootable windows, you do not even need to copy the data, you can boot directly from the CD as well. I am going for the simplest method at the moment.

Next I mount my 16 USB Flash drive. Since I have two internal hard drives this will show up as the third drive, which I have formatted with the ext4 filesystem.

#Create the mount point.
mkdir -p /mnt/sdc1;
#Mount USB Drive.
mount /dev/sdc1 /mnt/sdc1;

Now we are fully prepared to copy the porteus and boot directories to our destined device.

In windows you can copy the directory structure over using your file manager.

To make sure that no premissions are modified during data transfer I use rsync in linux.

rsync -rvpl /mnt/tmp/porteus /mnt/sdc1/; rsync -rvpl /mnt/tmp/boot /mnt/sdc1;

So your data is finished transferring and where do we go from here? Well all we have left to do is set the bootloader. Porteus comes with a tool that will do this for you.

Linux filesystem users will want to run this command from the porteus boot folder:
/mnt/sdc1/boot/lin_start_here.sh

Windows filesystem users will also want to go to the boot directory but instead run the file:
win_start_here.hta

Ok so you have followed the instructions and here are done the install. All that is needed is to modify your Bios to point to your USB Drive as described here: http://porteus.org/info/docs/37-installing/114-official-porteus-installation-guide-v-10.html#App-A

Congratulations, You now have a working Porteus installation!