Dear all,
I am looking for a small distro that can do the following
a. can boot from external usb , or from a small partition of a hard disk (easy so far)
b. can load everything in memory and run everything from there. So something light. I have 4 gb of ram that can be used entirely from os. I do not think is too hard to expect to see a bit of gui and a firefox with 4gb of ram

c. (most important) after it boots disables the hard disk. Keeps it unmounted and if possible turn the disk to sleep or shut down mode.

With the c. I expect to see an increase in battery duration.

What do you think? Is there a distro that can do a+b but also c?

B.R
Alex

If it has to be a small distro have a look at Tinycore, Slitaz, Puppy, Bodhi.

SliTaz is my personal favorite "from RAM" distro.

Porteus has all those properties
https://porteus.org/

Yep, porteus will do all that -- you'll boot with the cheatcodes "copy2ram" and "noauto", this will copy all of the files into RAM (you have four times the RAM needed for this), and noauto will prevent the system from automounting your drives. If your hard disk is still spinning (it shouldn't be), you can put it to sleep with sdparm.

Hmm.. Ok Porteus can do that.. but few more questions.
Instead of booting from usb stick, can I install it in 1 gb partition.
Customize my opensuse's boot loader to have an extra entry for porteus?

After porteus is loaded from my hard disk how I can shut down my computer?

What type of software porteus has?

B.R
Alex

Do you actually need a separate distro or would you be content to get a better battery life from OpenSUSE?

http://doc.opensuse.org/documentatio...ing.power.html

Yes, you can install it to a 1GB partition, or you can put it in the same partition as opensuse. In either case, you'll be doing a "frugal" install, meaning the OS will remain compressed in .xzm modules, and it will continue to run in your memory rather than extracting all files onto your hard disk in the typical linux directory structure (this is why it can exist on the same partition as opensuse...or any linux, or even windows).

Here's the install guide:
http://porteus.org/component/content...uide-v-10.html

But you don't want to run the installation script if you want to keep using your opensuse bootloader. You'll just extract the contents of the porteus ISO to your partition (you'll have two folders, /boot/ and /porteus), and point your bootloader to load the porteus kernel and initrd (see the file /boot/porteus.cfg to see the commands you'll want to pass to the kernel). You might want to install it to a flash drive first to get familiar with the boot parameters.

I'm not sure I understand this question:
"After porteus is loaded from my hard disk how I can shut down my computer?"

You'll shut down porteus with the 'halt' or 'reboot' command, or from the lxde or kde menu 'shutdown', but I don't think that's your question. If you're asking about how to shut down your hard drive, then by using the boot parameters 'copy2ram' and 'nohd', your hard drive should be shut down automatically as soon as porteus loads all of the data needed to boot the system; if not, you can shut it down manually with sdparm:
"sdparm -C stop /dev/sdX"

note that this line could also be added to the script, /etc/rc.d/rc.local, and it will put your drive to sleep every time you start up Porteus, as soon as you enter init 4.

More power saving tips for Porteus:
http://porteus.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=39&t=667

Porteus is based on slackware, and it is binary compatible with slackware (it's built on slackware 13.37). The 32-bit version of Porteus ships with KDE3 (trinity) and LXDE. The 64-bit version ships with KDE4 and LXDE; for more information on the software included, go here:
http://porteus.org/info/features.html

Additional software can be installed with the Porteus Package Manager. I hope this helps, and if you have any more questions, feel free to ask on our forum:
http://porteus.org/forum

Cheers!

Great answer (yes I meant hard disk.. so great guess too).
I will try this tomorrow and I will post back
One more questions then is can I install some more software in that os "permanently" or at least to install it every time. I was thinking for example for skype.

B.R
Alex

Yes, you can install software permanently by adding modules to your Porteus install -- this is the same concept that Slax uses, if you're familiar with it (Porteus evolved out of Slax). Our package manager is currently being rewritten and improved to handle downloading and converting software from multiple repositories, and that should be ready for our release of V1.1 final, later this month or early next. In the mean time, you can download modules from our repo using the Porteus Package Manager, and if something is not in our repo, you can download the slackware .txz packages (probably easiest with the included slackyd utility, which handles dependency resolution) and convert them to porteus modules using the txz2xzm utility. If you run into problems, I can help with creating modules.

Good luck!

Unfortunately I am not familiar.. so short question can you please help me to install just skype into my installation. I made today a partition of 1.something Gb partition to install my distro there. Then I will change my bootloader to load it.

B.R
Alex

Assuming you are installing the 32-bit version of Porteus, then you can download this module from the fidoslax repo: http://code.google.com/p/fidoslax/do...&can=2&q=skype
You will also need qt4: http://code.google.com/p/fidoslax/do...xzm&can=2&q=qt
Because 32-bit porteus ships with KDE Trinity, which is built on qt3.

If you're installing 64-bit Porteus, let me know, because I think you'll also need some 32-bit compatibility libraries... I can't find a 64-bit slackware build for Skype.

To install those modules, simply download and place them in your /porteus/modules folder inside your porteus partition, and when you boot up, they'll be activated and skype will be in your kde/lxde menu.

I am using 64 bit but what the heck I can live with 32 bit also....
I ham trying it for some time now and I like the distro
My favorite settings are noauto, copy2ram. Right now I am using a usb flash disk to load the distro. I have noticed that it only needed 300 megabytes in my flash disk which I found great!

Few more questions:
after the copy2ram is finished the usb stick can be removed with safety is not that right?
What is the best filesystem for the usb flash disk, if I want to dedicate one such flash disk only for that os?

Final question, is it possible to install the porteus into a hard disk partition (like 500mbs of space) and install skype? After the installation can I load the distro from the hard disk and ask all the hard drives to go to sleep? Where to put a bash script for doing that?

B.R
Alex

yeah, you can do all that,
except DONT pull out the USB if the persistent store file ( slaxsave.dat or a save folder) is on usb as I think it will be mountted, though I could be wrong.

I boot most frugal live persistent distros off hdd and Porteus excels at this

Yes, linus72 is correct, if you are using saved changes, you won't be able to unmount/pull the drive.

If you are booting "always fresh", i.e. with no saved changes, the filesystem makes almost no difference (I have done extensive testing). Even FAT or NTFS is fine. If you are saving changes, you can do so with a 'save.dat' which is an image file that will hold files with unix permissions on a FAT or NTFS file, but it is much easier to use a posix compatible filesystem. I've found ext4 to be the best match of speed, reliability and recoverability for my flash drives.

You could fit 64bit+skype+32-bit compat libraries in 500MB, but not with saved changes. You could also put 32-bit and 64-bit porteus on the same partition (there's a howto on our site), that would take about a gig.