Playing with Portable Linux
The other day, I came to a realization: I have too many flash drives. Because of modern network speeds, I hardly have a use for most of them now, and the most use that they’ve gotten is passing around installers and wifi keys to a set of computers.
Obviously, the only thing to do is put Linux on it.
Since I wanted to try something different, I went with a Slackware-based distribution called Porteus (a fork of Slax). Out of the box, it handled wireless perfectly on the computers I tried it on, and was extremely lightweight - so much so that I’ve had no problems with grabbing any packages (called modules) that I want.
Modules are made in several different ways:
- Convert a Slackware package
- Convert an rpm or deb
- Create a module from a folder or tarball
- Download from
usm, which uses slackware and slackware-related repositories and converts the packages
Modules are “installed” simply by using activate, which mounts the package. That means no copying, and no slowdown. Though the deactivate conflicts with that of virtualenv.
Overall, it’s an interesting tool, and one that’s nice and easy to use for situations when I want to work in my own environment but only have other peoples’ computers.