How to boot tiny core in to text mode ?

[awatar100]

Hello i have tinycore linux on my flash drive /dev/hda1.
How to start installed system in text mode with multivt ?
I have grub, where i have to add "text" and "multivt" option ?
my menu.lst is like this :

default 0
timeout 10
title tinycore
kernel /boot/bzImage quiet
initrd /boot/tinycore.gz

my target machine have only 56MiB of ram :-)

[maro]

Put it on the 'kernel' line.

BTW, 'quiet' is also a boot code, so any additional ones just need to be added to it.

[awatar100]

Nice - it works.
One more thing... how to auto login user "tc" in second console ?

[maro]

If you really want to save on RAM usage and have no need for an X server at all, why don't you use MicroCore? This would save you a couple of MBytes. I've done a quick comparison between TC 3.1 and MC 3.1 (using 'qemu -m 56 ....') and the former had 22384 kBytes used, whilst the value for the latter was 14484.

You could either download an ISO image from here or just the initrd from here Since the kernels are anyway identical, the initrd is the only difference in the ISO (apart from the respective filename in the boot loader config).

Regarding the autologin in a second VT, I'm afraid you might be out of luck there. For '/dev/tty1' this is achieved via the '--autologin' option of '/sbin/rungetty' (which is controlled via '/etc/inittab' or 'etc/inittab-save' in case of the 'multivt' boot code). According to a man page I've read, only one autologin (and limited to '/dev/tty1') is supported. Mind you, no one can stop you to compile a patched version of it yourself, and integrate it into the initrd (AKA remastering).

[tinypoodle]

To save as much RAM as possible it might be preferable to allocate tty's dynamically as needed, in order to avoid spending memory for running *getty.

Here is the command I came to by experimenting, not sure how good practice it is, might possibly be improved:

Code: [Select]

sudo openvt -c N su - tcwhere N would be the number of the next free tty

Of course also need of additional logins are omitted in this way, as new tty's are allocated by a user logged in already.

I found a specific issue with this though. When running links in graphic (framebuffer) mode as non-root user it would not pick up the gpm mouse pointer (gpm has to be run as root), so I'd either have to run links as root, or preferably reserve tty1 for the use of links.

[curaga]

@tinypoodle

You can get a normal getty result while also saving ram. Change "respawn" to "askfirst" - now init will wait for an enter press before launching even getty.

[tinypoodle]

curaga,
thanks, learned something  

For the record: in distros having 6 VT's or more, i often used to run an app very low in memory consumption to omit spending RAM on *getty.