piCore-X beta available

[Cloudcentric]

OK like Core & Tiny Core, makes sense, thanks for prompt reply, I will continue with piCore then.....

[bmarkus]

OK like Core & Tiny Core, makes sense, thanks for prompt reply, I will continue with piCore then.....

Yes, I'm trying to make piCore as much close to x86 as possible. There are only miner differences, but philosohpy is the same.

[roberts]

OK like Core & Tiny Core, makes sense, thanks for prompt reply, I will continue with piCore then.....

Yes, I'm trying to make piCore as much close to x86 as possible. There are only miner differences, but philosohpy is the same.

I think bmarkus meant to say the prebuilt extensions in piCore-X, aka TinyCore for Raspberry Pi, as I made and offered Core on the Raspberry Pi before he had one. I was asked by him to also make Core that would emulate raspberry pi on Qemu, as he did not have a pi. Compiling the kernel and libs on raspberry pi was a 12 hour endeavour. My plan was to address all new SoCs with import. It was bmarkus that decided to take the route of re-compiling extensions. And for that he deserves much credit.

[Cloudcentric]

Thank you both for replies and think I understand the ideas behind each version and am pleased for all the hard work you have undertaken.


I am now running X86 TC Plus as my second O/S and learning, as said before will stick with the ARMv6 piCore version as I have it running satifactorily.


http://tinycorearm.blogspot.co.uk

[bmarkus]

Picore-X is updated to 4.7.4, current version is piCore-X-beta130124a

Download link:

www.tinycorelinux.net/4.x/armv6/piCore-X-beta130124a.img.gz

[str4ng3r]

Picore-X is updated to 4.7.4, current version is piCore-X-beta130124a

Download link:

www.tinycorelinux.net/4.x/armv6/piCore-X-beta130124a.img.gz

Markus, what changed from version beta130123?

[bmarkus]

Base updated from 4.7.3 to 4.7.4, preinstalled extensions are the same.

[bmarkus]

piCore-X-beta130129a is available. Changes:

• Xorg-7.6.tcz updated, keyboard issues fixed

Download link:

www.tinycorelinux.net/4.x/armv6/piCore-X-beta130129a.img.gz

[cast-fish]

Hello

was just reading the threads a little...

so is Pi Core X coming with just a few GUI apps ready to go + sound.

What apps are they. One would assume there is a web surfer and such

thankyou

Vi.

[bmarkus]

Web browsers in the repo:

- lynx
- elinks
- dillo3

Email client:

- alpine
- claws-mail built, will be in repo soon

And a GCC toolchain, you are welcome to contribute with tcz's.

[bmarkus]

piCore-X updated to 4.7.5

Dowload:

piCore-X-beta130226.img.gz
piCore-X-beta130226.img.gz.md5.txt

[roborob]

Hi Béla,

Thank you for piCore-X.  I have it running on a Raspberry Model B, with an old 128MB miniSD.  No modifications, just pure piCore-X.

The and... part is this:  Is there a way to boot from the SD card, then install piCore-X to a USB drive? 

I admit I haven't done much footwork at this point.  I am asking mainly to make sure I don't waste a bunch of time on something that will ultimately not work, or may not be a good idea.  I am also guessing the SD boot is hard coded into the Raspberry BIOS otherwise everyone would be booting from a USB drive and not even bothering with the SD card.  The ultimate use case would be to install from SD and boot natively from from HD, following the TC paradigm of booting from CD and installing (frugal) to the HD of a PC (or VM in my case).  However the reality may be that I will always need the SD card for the bootstrap, which I am OK with at this point.  I am hoping to use an old 250GB laptop HD in a USB enclosure on powered USB hub.  Or perhaps a 128GB SSD via powered USB. 

Is there a way to install piCore-X to a USB HD currently?  Could it be as simple as mounting, copying, then editing the cmdline.txt?

[bmarkus]

Hi Roborob

you can boot RPi only from SD card. It contains not only the operating system components but also firware for the RPi's SoC, system configuration, etc.

Tiny Core Linux (TC) is not installed as ordinary Linux systems. It mounts extensions (packages with .tcz file name) which are stored in a /tce directory. In most cases this directory resides on the second partition of the SD card formatted as Linux ext/ext4 partion and big enough to accomodate extensions. This directory is also used to keep backups. But it is just a convention.

During boot TC is checking all available partitions (FAT/ext2/ext3/ext4) for /tce and will use the first found. It means, you can have an USB stick with /tce on ext4 partition. If no /tce on the SD card, system will use the USB stick. Same with HDD's or any other connected storage.

Notes:

External device must be ready during boot, otherwise TC will not find /tce. Use waitusb command line option. Start with waitusb=5 wich means 5 sec waiting for the USB. Increase it if necessary. Alternatively you can use UUID. Search Forum for details, it is not piCore specific.

HDD can consume high current during spinning up even if they are consuming much less during operation. HDD may require special USB cable, othervise you will loose voltage due to high current which may cause issues for the HDD. Considere that RPi's USB implementation is lets say poor, so I would not recommend to use an USB HDD. But it may work.

Just a private note, I do not see much reason to use USB stick or to play with extra power supplies, hubs, cables and loose an USB connector when 4G/8GB SD cards are cheap now and for the same price in few month you will get 16GB.

[roborob]

Hi Béla,

Thank you for the information. 

The whole idea behind using a USB drive mass storage.  I really like how TC is super small and efficient, however some use cases may include large (relatively) data storage requirements.  I know, not typical, but I have a need.  External devices and power are acceptable in this case as well. 

Thanks also for the mention about current draw.  The USB drive enclosure came with a Y cable, one for data and the other for additional power.  I also use a powered USB hub to reduce the load on RPi. 

One thing you mention has me curious though: "RPi's USB implementation is lets say poor".  What would you consider are the shortcommings? Buffering, limited or slow transfer?  One use case I was considering included a USB camera and USB HD for local video capture and storage.

Another use case is the ability to store user configurations on USB.  This would allow students to save "their profile" to USB, allowing the RPi to be shared, yet remain configured for each individual.

[bmarkus]

One thing you mention has me curious though: "RPi's USB implementation is lets say poor".  What would you consider are the shortcommings? Buffering, limited or slow transfer?  One use case I was considering included a USB camera and USB HD for local video capture and storage.

According to articles it's about 100Mbit/s, but I didn't test it. But it is a general opinion it's a sh...  Or it was. Maybe latest firmware and/or kernel behaves a bit better. Must be tested.

OK, I see the USB case in an educational environment where you must hide the box from touching; an external USB connector is much safer It works fine, just put /tce to the USB.