Porteus Openbox is an open source Linux-based operating system derived from the Slackware Linux and built around the lightweight Openbox window manager.
The Porteus operating system is known for offering its users an in-house built Software Center application that lets them easily install, updated and remove packages, as well as a unique dependency-resolving package manager and support for multiple languages.
There are seven desktop flavors of Porteus, with some of the lightest desktop environments and window managers around. These include Porteus Xfce, Porteus LXDE, Porteus LXQt, Porteus MATE, and Porteus Cinnamon. There’s a Porteus KDE edition too.
Supports 32-bit and 64-bit computers
Like all the other Porteus editions, Porteus Openbox is distributed as live ISO images supporting both 64-bit and 32-bit computers. The ISO images are ISO-hybrid, which means they can be written to CD/DVD discs or USB flash drives (recommended for persistence sessions).
Boot options
The beautifully customized boot menu is identic to the other Porteus editions, allowing users to start the graphical environment, start a fresh copy if you used persistance on a USB drive, copy the live session to RAM (requires more than 768MB of system memory).
Additionally, you can boot in text mode and start the command prompt only, update the Intel microcode firmware, initialize a PXE server so you can boot Porteus on other computers on your home network, and access the PLoP boot manager.
By default Porteus Openbox boots with a persistent session. This will allow users to save modifications to configuration files or downloaded documents, but only if you use it from a USB stick. The boot menu also lets you boot an installed operating system.
Openbox window manager by default
The Porteus Openbox edition is the simplest of all seven Porteus flavors. It uses the Openbox window manager by default combined with various open-source applications and utilities to create a useful graphical interface with a single panel on top of the screen.
The panel (Tint2) includes an applications menu (GTK Menu), a taskbar and application launcher area with a few shortcuts for the file manager, terminal, and package manager by default, a workspace switcher, and a system tray area with clock, volume, calendar, network, and language indicators.
Default applications
Default applications include the SpaceFM file manager, MPV video player, Sakura terminal emulator, Leafpad text editor, P7ZIP archive manager, gFTP file transfer manager, Transmission BitTorrent client, Polyglot language translator, and ePDFViewer document viewer.
Also included, we can find a bunch of system utilities like a task manager, UXTerm terminal emulator, a tool to create live USB sticks from ISO images, a VirtualBox builder, an image viewer, a calculator, a screenshot tool, and Openbox configuration manager.
Bottom line
Summing up, Porteus Openbox proved to be an extremely fast and very lightweight GNU/Linux distribution that includes only some basic apps and system utilities to get you started. It very resource-friendly and perfect for a low-end personal computer or laptop.
