After a while, the Porteus team has announced the availability of another Porteus v4.0 release candidate 4 for testing. Despite the RC4 in version number, this release is actually first release candidate of Porteus made available to the public. It includes several new firmware and other base packages to provide a smoother and solid user experience.
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What is Porteus?
Porteus is a small sized, yet complete general purpose GNU/Linux distribution based on Slackware. Porteus is well known for it's customizability and optimization for portable devices. Porteus is optimized to boot from a wide range of portable devices like pen drives, compact disks, hard drive and other bootable storage devices. It can boot & start funcitioning in a small amount of time.
For more information on Porteus GNU/Linux, you can checkout our gallery project.
For more information on Porteus GNU/Linux, you can checkout our gallery project.
What are the highlights in Porteus v4.0 RC4?
Porteus v4.0 RC4 is a development release of upcoming Porteus v4.0 stable release. This release candidate is bigger comparing to previous release candidate. It is caused due to the inclusion of extra packages and firmware to provide stable, reliable and smoother user experience.
Some of the main highlights in Porteus v4.0 RC4 release includes:
- Kernel 4.15.2
- Based on Slackware current
- Provides 7 desktop environments to choose from.
- New configuration file at porteus/porteus-v4.0-x86_64.cfg which replaces the .sgn file and can hold cheat codes. One per line.
- New update-browser feature to update or download your preferred browser (available in GUI)
- Support for EFI (using syslinux for both BIOS and EFI boots) Only one config file now exists for both methods: /mnt/sdXY/boot/syslinux/porteus.cfg
- New Porteus update feature built in to update the base modules
- Intel microcode available in boot folder (load with initrd=/boot/syslinux/intel-ucode.cpio,/boot/syslinux/initrd.xz in boot line)
Where can I download Porteus v4.0 RC4?
Porteus v4.0 RC4 is available in both 32 bit and 64 bit variations. You can find these images in official mirrors of Porteus GNU/Linux. Following are Porteus mirrors active at the moment (16th Feb 2018)
- http://ftp.vim.org/ftp/os/Linux/distr/porteus/
- http://ftp.nluug.nl/os/Linux/distr/porteus/
- http://mirrors.dotsrc.org/porteus/
- http://ftp.cc.uoc.gr/pub/linux/porteus/
- http://www6.frugalware.org/mirrors/linux/porteus/
- http://ftp.riken.jp/Linux/porteus/
- https://ftp.heanet.ie/mirrors/dl.porteus.org/
- http://www.mirrorservice.org/sites/dl.porteus.org/
- http://linux.rz.rub.de/porteus/
For further information, see Porteus v4.0 RC4 release announcement published in projects forum.