General TC > General TC Talk
Interested journalist with a few questions
bmarkus:
Hi Adam
first of all welcome here :)
I kindly advice to start using TC for few weeks or a month to get a handson experience before publishing any review. It is a unique and different system, it need some time to be familiar with it for IT professionals too. To see a picture or read how to make an apple pie is not same as to taste.
--- Quote ---Installation and persistence
--- End quote ---
There are no need for traditional installation. TC core, the minimal working system is loaded into RAM by bootloader. Once it started boot media can be unmounted and it doesn't require any mounted partition. Extensions (packages) are read-only compressed squash images added to file system at boot time dinamically. They are loop mounted in most cases but it is possible to copy all or selected extensions to RAM. Copying all you can release media. This solution is ideal for embedded applications specially on systems with SD cards or eMMC flash to avoid file system corruption when e.g. your wife just pulls out the plug from wall outlet of the media player client or internet radio. At next reboot you have a clean system, same as before.
Other benefit is that you can have multiple set of extensions and you can select which one to load. With this you can have multiple systems, one for development, one for production test, one for x86, another for x86_64, etc. On the same machine without interference between them, without causing critical demage during development or experimenting.
By default no data saved by the system itself. However, you can save configurable data to a single gzipped file, saved in a single directory with extensions and restored automatically at next boot. Different extension sets have their own saved data. You can configure home directory, opt and /tce dirs (used for extensions and data backup) on a hard disk partion or multiple partitions if you want. You have full control.
Personally I'm booting system from USB stick and keep multiple /tce directories on HDD. It gives me a speed and flexibility to work with different versions easily without always reinstalling system. And I have never missed traditional installation in past years.
Juanito:
Most of what I would have said has been said above, but just to add:
--- Quote from: interestedjournalist on January 21, 2016, 11:38:05 AM ---1. Who are the ideal users of Tiny Core Linux? Developers using the system as a base and "remixing" it for other purposes? General-purpose computing users? Those looking for a "dumb" cloud terminal?
--- End quote ---
I'd say the ideal user could be anybody from a linux newcomer with an old hand-me-down machine all the way up to a developer with serious hardware.
Tinycorelinux is a perfect tool for a casual user to resurrect otherwise junk hardware for use as a web browser/email client/music player. It is also very easy to develop on due to the tiny base and granular extension system.
The adaptability of Tinycorelinux is perhaps best demonstrated by the fact that it can run a small, basic Fltk GUI using a few extensions all the way up to a recent gnome desktop using hundreds of extensions.
Jason W:
Hi Adam.
As for the ideal audience for Tinycore, it is actually the only system I will set up for a non technical user where I will need to support the installation as most any mistake is solved with a reboot, and at worst if the hard drive crashes or the frugal installation is deleted, having to reinstall is a matter of replacing the kernel file, core.gz image, and extension directory which holds all the programs and saved settings.
And I would like to say a little more about what is called dCore. It is an offering whose base system is Debian library compatible and pulls it's packages directly from a Debian repository as well as from a set of premade ones. Currently there are x86 dCore offerings for Debian Wheezy and Jessie, as well as several Ubuntu releases, and there is a Wheezy compatible version for armv7. dCore is built on the same Tinycore principles - small base system, optional persistence, frugal install, backup/restore, read only mountable extensions, pristine boot - and the differences in package sources are mostly transparent to the user. In short, it is just another way to use Tinycore. And development is open to anyone who wants to contribute.
interestedjournalist:
Thank you all so much for your great answers!
I had two more questions:
1. Is dCore an official part of the Tiny Core project?
2. Are the boot codes one can use in the command line distinct tools made specifically for Tiny Core, or are they kernel boot parameters as used in other distributions? If the former, what are some of the more useful tools for new users?
Thanks!
Adam
Misalf:
2.
http://distro.ibiblio.org/tinycorelinux/faq.html#bootcodes
All of these, except for vga= AFAICT, are Tiny Core specific, used either for configuration (like specifying a TCE directory, persistence, localization and other system relevant settings etc.) or troubleshooting (pause, base, norestore). Most of which are handled in /etc/init.d/tc-config .
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