Over a year later, the Porteus Linux development team has finally ad the second candidate version (RC-2) for its next version 5.0. This means that you can now try the new Porteus 5.0-rc2 test version.
For those who don't know, Porteus is based on one of the oldest Linux distributions, Slackware. It was also known as the Slax remix when it started out as a community remix of Slax OS.
Porteus aims to provide a portable, fast and lightweight operating system that you can boot directly in under 15 seconds (in the case of the LXDE desktop) from CD, USB stick, hard drive or other bootable storage media.
Porteus 5.0-rc2: What's new?
As usual, v5.0-rc2 is available in seven desktop variants: Cinnamon, KDE, LXDE, LXQT, MATE, Openbox and Xfce only for the x86_64 architecture.
Replacing the gtk + 2 widget toolkit, Porteus 5.0-rc2 now includes gtk + 3 in its 002-xorg base modules. However, some desktop environments still include gtk + 2, like Openbox, LXDE, and Xfce.
Built with gtk + 3, Porteus also ported its gtkdialog scripts to pygoobject3. The porting process is still ongoing; therefore, gtkdialog remains available for some unported scripts.
Under the hood, it comes with the long-term Linux kernel 5.4.57, which brings kernel locking features, support for Microsoft's exFAT file system, and support for other hardware, such as AMD Radeon Navi 12 and 14 GPUs, AMD Radeon Arcturus GPUs, and AMD Dali APUs.
Speaking of apps available on all desktops such as Gparted, Transmission, and Celluloid, v5.0-rc2 has moved them to 002-xorg or 002-xtra modules. In addition, the new 002-xtra core module now contains custom media packages like ffmpeg, mpv.
To streamline the boot process, Porteus rebuilt the initrd.xz schema with a new busybox software suite and an improved linuxrc program. It also added experimental support for the Redundant Array of Independent Disks (RAID).
Among other small changes, it removed its broken USB installer and USM package manager without replacement at this time.
If you want to test it now, download the ISO image of any flavor, the size of which is less than 400MB.
