Build Your Own Portable Linux Distro with Porteus

Productivity Sauce

Building a customized Linux distribution can be a daunting proposition -- unless you use Porteus Wizard. This clever and simple service lets you create a custom Live CD distro that fits a USB stick and loads in RAM. The best part is that you don't need any particular Linux skills to build your own distro. The wizard allows you to select and configure a handful of options, and the entire process takes only a few minutes.

Pick the desired architecture, desktop environment, and applications as well as configure basic settings such as timezone and keyboard. Once you've done that, hit the Build button, and your freshly-baked Linux distro should be ready for download almost instantaneously. The resulting distro is based on Porteus, a Slackware-based distribution optimized to run from removable storage devices. To install the created distro onto a USB stick, use the dd tool to write the content of the ISO image to the stick. Switch then to the /boot directory on the USB stick and run the Porteus-installer-for-Linux.com script to finish the installation. Similar to other Live CD distros, your very own version of Porteus supports a wide range of cheatcodes stored in the /boot/docs directory. The cheatcodes are also available for your perusal on the dedicated Cheatcodes page.