piCore 5.1 released

[bmarkus]

Team Tiny Core is pleased to announce the availability of piCore 5.1, the Raspberry Pi port of Tiny Core Linux. It is an independent system architected by Robert Shingledecker and now developed by a small team of developers with strong community support.

Tiny Core Linux is not a traditional distribution but a toolkit to create your own customized system. It offers not only flexibility, small footprint but a very recent kernel and set of applications making it ideal for custom systems, appliances as well as to learn Linux, matching Raspberry Pi perfectly. It is running entirely in RAM. There is no installation in conventional terms; extensions mounted read only, after reboot the same clean system is available. Base raw SD card image with CLI version is only 21.5 Mbyte including RPi boot loader, firmware and support files. Key features:

Main features:

• Kernel 3.12.7 with sound DAC support
• BusyBox 1.22.1
• eglibc 2.18
• Xorg-7.7
• zswap (compressed swap in RAM), zram (compressed RAM)
• Linaro 4.8-2013.11 (GCC 4.8.3) toolchain
• Common TC 5.1 base

Images with preinstalled SSH for headless operation and with GUI also available at

http://tinycorelinux.net/5.x/armv6/release/

For support visit http://forum.tinycorelinux.net/index.php/board,57.0.html

Béla Márkus
piCore Release Manager

[Franxoois]

Hi,

Great work !

I may have an issue with my wifi dongle.

Here is the result of lsusb

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Bus 001 Device 004: ID 0846:9030 NetGear, Inc. WNA1100 Wireless-N 150 [Atheros AR9271]
dmesg

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[   26.580533] cfg80211: Calling CRDA to update world regulatory domain
[   28.968248] usb 1-1.2: ath9k_htc: Firmware htc_9271.fw requested
[   28.975214] usbcore: registered new interface driver ath9k_htc
[   32.960765] smsc95xx 1-1.1:1.0 eth0: hardware isn't capable of remote wakeup
[   33.535186] usb 1-1.2: ath9k_htc: Failed to get firmware htc_9271.fw
[   33.535440] usb 1-1.2: ath9k_htc: USB layer deinitialized

lsmod

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Module                  Size  Used by    Not tainted
ath9k_htc              56814  0
ath9k_common            2725  1 ath9k_htc
ath9k_hw              422021  2 ath9k_htc,ath9k_common
mac80211              318613  1 ath9k_htc
ath                    17073  3 ath9k_htc,ath9k_common,ath9k_hw
cfg80211              196566  3 ath9k_htc,mac80211,ath
ftdi_sio               29623  0
usbserial              24424  1 ftdi_sio
df

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/dev/loop25             204.0K    204.0K         0 100% /tmp/tcloop/firmware-rtlwifi
/dev/loop26              32.0K     32.0K         0 100% /tmp/tcloop/firmware-ralinkwifi
/dev/loop27               1.1M      1.1M         0 100% /tmp/tcloop/firmware-atheros

iwconfig

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dummy0    no wireless extensions.

lo        no wireless extensions.

eth0      no wireless extensions.

tunl0     no wireless extensions.

[tinypoodle]

http://wireless.kernel.org/en/users/Drivers/ath9k_htc#Firmware

[bmarkus]

Install firmware.tcz, it contains the firmware:

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[  100.842566] usb 1-1.2.1: ath9k_htc: Firmware htc_9271.fw requested
[  100.851268] usbcore: registered new interface driver ath9k_htc
[  103.194991] usb 1-1.2.1: ath9k_htc: Transferred FW: htc_9271.fw, size: 51272
[  103.439035] ath9k_htc 1-1.2.1:1.0: ath9k_htc: HTC initialized with 33 credits
[  103.870254] ath9k_htc 1-1.2.1:1.0: ath9k_htc: FW Version: 1.3
[  103.870285] ath: EEPROM regdomain: 0x809c
[  103.870295] ath: EEPROM indicates we should expect a country code
[  103.870307] ath: doing EEPROM country->regdmn map search
[  103.870317] ath: country maps to regdmn code: 0x52
[  103.870357] ath: Country alpha2 being used: CN
[  103.870370] ath: Regpair used: 0x52
[  103.881407] ieee80211 phy0: Atheros AR9271 Rev:1
[  119.393378] NET: Registered protocol family 10


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root@box:/home/tc# iwconfig
wlan0     IEEE 802.11bgn  ESSID:off/any
          Mode:Managed  Access Point: Not-Associated   Tx-Power=20 dBm
          Retry  long limit:7   RTS thr:off   Fragment thr:off
          Encryption key:off
          Power Management:off

dummy0    no wireless extensions.

lo        no wireless extensions.

eth0      no wireless extensions.

tunl0     no wireless extensions.

root@box:/home/tc#

[Franxoois]

That's allright, thank you very much !

[Gerrelt]

Hi Bela,

Thank you for this release! The SSH version is very welcome again.
I installed it on 3 Raspberries, and everything is working.
At first I had some problems extending the partition, but that was mainly due to my limited knowledge of partitioning.

The included README is very good, the part of extending the partition was very usefull.
I noticed the tce dir is now in the second partition allready in the SSH image, very good!

I discovered some typo's in the README. I hope you don't mind that I corrected it, and I also changed item 1 about starting the fdisk command (at line 78) a bit.
Owh, and I think in item 2, there is an error, it should say "exit fdisk with 'w' command." instead of "q", I think.
I have attached my version of the README to this post.

Many thanks for your work!

Greetings,
    Gerrelt.

[bmarkus]

Hi Gerrelt

thanks a lot for README text corrections, it is welcome and I will update WEB and download files. Glad to hear you like the new layout. Now mmcblk0p1 is really just for boot and left intact during operation avoiding false use making system more safe. At first expanding may look a bit complicated but in fact it is not so bad I was thinkg to make it automatic but later dropped idea to keep flexibility and user control. It is TC-like now.

Regards... Bela

[meo]

Hi bmarkus!

Very nice job! Works like a charm. I've just been able to connect two machines to enable parallellprocessing. For that I used the Raspbian distro but really TC for Pi would probably be faster in executing code. I'm just not used to the webbrowsers available for TC for Pi just yet to download what I need. An idea popped up when I was considering the problem. Wouldn't it be possible to repack Iceweasel (that is awailable for the Raspberry Pi) so it could be used with TC for Pi with a script? I'm not a script kiddie so I wouldn't be able to make it but I thought it was worth to mention.

Thanks for making TC awailable for the awesome Rapberry Pi,
meo

PS The Thanks should be directed to the whole team working on this project including Robert S. DS

[bmarkus]

PS The Thanks should be directed to the whole team working on this project including Robert S. DS

First thanks Robert for concept and architecting Tiny Core Linux, the TC Team for common TC scripts, ideas, packages, etc.

And to the community contributing to the whole TC project, including piCore!

[bmarkus]

Wouldn't it be possible to repack Iceweasel (that is awailable for the Raspberry Pi) so it could be used with TC for Pi with a script? I'm not a script kiddie so I wouldn't be able to make it but I thought it was worth to mention.

Issue is the dependency chain. In general Raspbian apps depend on much more libs than necessary and/or available in piCore which is cleaner. But you can try.

[meo]

Thanks for your answer bmarkus!

What available browser would you suggest?

Kind regards,
meo

[bmarkus]

Try netsurf.

[beerstein]

netsurf works great. Is it possible to have javascript turned on temporarily?

I discovered a small glitch:When in apps browser in left window pciutils.tcz is selected, the right info window shows usbutils.tcz - but it installs the right thing.

congratulations bmarkus. I love your piCore. Wish I had something like that for my cubietruck A20

[bmarkus]

No javascript, it doesn't build at the moment. Nothing to be enabled.

Will check appbrowser, thanks for reporting.

For your A20 there is dCore, isn't it?

[beerstein]

yes the Allwinner A10 uCore works fine with cubieboard2.I have it running also on my cubietruck (cubieboard3) but cubietruck has a 1 GHz LAN network card plus wireless on board. Both drivers are missing and they need to be compiled into the kernel? Or loaded - this is what I do not know and I do not have the skills and knowledge to do it.
I tried to find users at the cubiebard forum who could help, but no responses so far.