Tiny Core Linux

TinyCore is a nifty linux distro that's extremely small. Similar to DamnSmallLinux, but even smaller.

Booting

If you use TinyCore with PXE, all you need to do is to create a menu entry with:

LABEL Core
 	MENU LABEL Core
         kernel /images/core/vmlinuz
         INITRD /images/core/core.gz

Installing to Hard Drive

Get the tc-install package

Apps

The mirror can be selected by editing /opt/tcemirror. To use CPSC's mirror, enter:

http://mirror.cpsc.ucalgary.ca/mirror/tinycorelinux/

Modifying mydata.tgz

If you are running TinyCore on a NFS share, you might not be able to modify the system and then save the changes like you normally would with filetool.sh -b.

To modify mydata.tgz outside of the TinyCore environment:

# umask 022       # In case you have a weird umask, default to 022.
# mkdir tce       # this dir should be 755 (anything less will kill your tce image)
# cd tce
# tar --numeric-owner -xzpf ../mydata.tgz   # Keep permissions and ownership!
## make your changes
# tar --numeric-owner -czpf ../mydata.tgz *     # Re-create the tarball with permissions

Overwrite the old mydata.tgz on the NFS share and then test the changes on TinyCore by running:

# filetoool.sh -r

Any changes you've made should be visible immediately.

Altering Initrd

Extract

To remaster the base image with additional packages, do the following:

$ mkdir -p /tmp/tinycore/extract
$ mv core.gz /tmp/tinycore  # where core.gz is the initrd file
$ cd /tmp/tinycore/extract
$ zcat ../core.gz

The extract directory should now contain the contents of the initrd file system.

Adding Additional Packages

To add additional packages to the system, download the .tcz files you want installed from the repository. Store them in /tmp/tinycore/packages, then run:

$ cd /tmp/tinycore/extract
$ for i in `ls ../packages/*.tcz` ; do unsquashfs -f -d . $i ; done

This will extract the squashfs package files and dump them into the root directory of the extracted initrd file system.

If you wish to run something on startup, put it in /opt/bootsync.sh or /opt/bootlocal.sh. /opt/bootsync.sh gets called by /etc/init.d/tc-config. Just note that networking might not be up immediately since the dhcp client runs asynchronously. I got around this by running while true ; do wget -O - http://somewhere.com && break ; done just to verify networking is up.

Remastering

With the changes made to the root file system, you will want to package the directory back up to create the initrd image. To do this, do:

$ cd /tmp/tinycore/extract
$ find