How to contribute to Porteus Linux

Whether you are an experienced user or brand new to Linux, there are several ways in which you can contribute to the community and help us improve Porteus.

Building, debugging and supporting an operating system is a complex and time consuming process. As a distribution that prides itself on having an active and engaged community, Porteus relies on help from our community members to handle some of these tasks, and the developers certainly appreciate all the help they can get! Here are some of the ways you can lend a hand:

Use Porteus and share your feedback

One of the best (and easiest) ways in which you can help Porteus continue to grow and evolve is to use it and tell us what you think, especially if something goes wrong. Nobody benefits from an unreported bug. When bugs are reported, we take them seriously and work to resolve them as quickly as possible. If you don't wish to create a username and password for our forums, feel free to email the administrators at admin@porteus.org.

In addition to bugs, we're also interested in knowing what applications and other software you'd like to have available through our package manager and what features you'd like to have added. Since our inception, we have received feedback such as this from our members and implemented it to help shape Porteus into a flexible yet powerful system.

We also appreciate feedback from our newer users, to let us know how the installation process is working and how to improve our documentation. We want Porteus to be easy to isntall, use and understand, and hearing from new users is the best way for us to know how we're doing, and how we can improve.

Spread the Word

You can also help Porteus by spreading the word about our distribution. Tell your friends and family about us and give them a free copy! You can like us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter. You can also recommend us on Linux-related or other technical forums. We get web traffic when our releases are mentioned on Distrowatch and other news feeds around the net, but we think people are more likely to try Porteus when they hear about it from people they know.

Download and test our Release Candidates

Prior to releasing a new version of Porteus, we usually release at least two "Release Candidates" for users to download, play with, and find bugs. More users testing the release candidates translates into fewer bugs and a better experience for the final version. While these release candidates are not considered truly stable, they are generally free from major bugs and are quite operable, with the latest features available. Please download the next release candidate and let usknow how it goes!

Provide Support on the Forums

If you see someone on the forum who is asking for help and you know the answer, please chime in! You don't need to wait for an administrator or moderator. While the admins and moderators are online frequently, having users help users frees up our time and enhances the forum's knowledge base. Likewise, if you see that someone has reported a bug on the forum, feel free to try to duplicate it, track down the cause, and report your findings on the forum. Even if you can't fix the problem, knowing how to duplicate the problem (or even knowing that others can't easily duplicate it) can help us find a fix more quickly.

Maintain packages

Our official maintainers compile or convert all of packages included by default in the ISO and most of the extra modules available in the Porteus Package Manager repository. While many of packages are simple to build and/or not updated often, other packages require more time to keep up with. The major web browsers, for example, have lots of features, options, and plugins, and they get updated often with new releases. If you're familiar with a package (or you are willing to get familiar with it), let us know that you'd like to help keep it current for other Porteus users. User-maintained packages should be built from source using a SlackBuild-style script so the official maintainers can easily build the package without any manual tweaks and put it in the module database.