Tinycore newbie

[lindsay]

Hi,

I have been tinkering with tinycore 7.2 for a week or so over the holidays and loving every minute of it.

My main goal was to have a minimal sandbox to run the latest firefox browser for my kids just by downloading the latest tar.bz2  directly from https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/all/).

It took a lot of tinkering and digging through the forums but I finally achieved what I wanted that I can use as a template going forward. I'd like to share my final config in the spirit of 'pay it forward'. Hopefully, it will save other's time.

I started with Core  (11Mb) and used tc-install.sh to install an absolute minimal system to the virtual box vdi.
My final onboot.lst looks like this:

• graphics-4.2.9-tinycore.tcz
• Xorg-7.7.tcz
• libffi5.tcz
• libwnck.tcz
• dbus-glib.tcz
• alsa.tcz
• alsa-config.tcz
• alsa-plugins.tcz
• alsamixergui.tcz
• aterm.tcz
• wbar.tcz
• flwm.tcz
• virtualbox-ose-additions.tcz

Of course, all of those can be installed with tce-install -wi <package-name.tcz>.
Once installed, restart to bring up Flux window manager in X.
Run xrandr in a terminal to adjust resolution as needed.

With that setup I can also mount a virtual box shared folder

• sudo modprobe vboxsf
• sudo mkdir /mnt/vboxsf
• sudo mount -t vboxsf vbox_shared /mnt/vboxsf

That makes for a nice barebones image with X, sound, minimal window manager and shared folders to the host system. (<100Mb)

Downloading the latest firefox (firefox-50.1.0.tar.bz2) I was then able to simply

• tar xf firefox-50.1.0.tar.bz2
• ./firefox/firefox

And voila.. Firefox!

Total size of the disk image jumped >150Mb. (mostly firefox)

Currently, I don't save sound state so I need to open user 'alsamixgui' to adjust sound volume settings in order to hear audio from the virtual machine when I bring it up.

Finally, I added a wbar icon to firefox using the instructions from here:
http://wiki.tinycorelinux.net/wiki:creating_custom_command_icons_in_wbar

It is simple to clone the above (even use vagrant) to spin up new instances for specialized environments...


My next goal is to get comfortable building my own tcz's. First will be for just the virtualbox shared folder (vboxsf) extension.
I had already built it from latest guestadditions.iso before I realized there was a tcz for a version that worked.

These are the tcz additions (in addition to above) I have in onboot.lst in another tinycore instance:

• fluff.tcz
• vim.tcz
• compiletc.tcz
• gc-dev.tcz
• openssl-dev.tcz
• bash.tcz

I have been using that to build various binaries from scratch and copy over into other minimal tinycore instances via shared folders.

As a note, tinycore  happily runs the latest nodejs binaries and npm, sqlite3 (again just download tar, unpack and run).

What an awesome sandbox to create and break in!

Regards,
/Lindsay

[coreplayer2]

Hi Lindsay

Welcome to TC

It's recommended to explore the "Book" from http://tinycorelinux.net/book.html when new to TinyCore

Also, were you not able find the firefox_getLatest.tcz extension?   It will create an extension with the latest version of firefox for you.    getFlash (or currently in repo getFlash_beta.tcz) will provide Flash.

APP's is the best utility for managing extensions, unless you prefer the terminal in which case use tce-ab

Also, in a VM it's unlikely you'll need alsa-config.tcz extension loaded, since VM's typically use the most basic of virtual hardware.

good luck

[andyj]

If you are using VMware you'll need alsa-config.tcz. Sound works just fine. Can't say about others.

[coreplayer2]

Really? You need alsa-config for vmware?  Well I trust you and stand corrected
[emoji12]


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

[andyj]

It shows up as a Cirrus Logic card:

Code: [Select]

tc@box:~$ cat /proc/asound/cards
 0 [AudioPCI       ]: ENS1371 - Ensoniq AudioPCI
                      Ensoniq AudioPCI ENS1371 at 0x2040, irq 18

Google Chrome and Earth work in a 64-bit VM, so watching videos with sound or playing with the flight simulator are possible too.

[lindsay]

Thanks for the info.

I've spent a couple of days poring over the pdf corebook. It is a great source of key information.

I tried the firefox and flash tcz's in the tce repo but neither worked for me and it wasn't clear at the time what I was missing. I'll try again when I starting tinkering with making my own tcz's.

In any event, downloading the lastest tar.bz2 from firefox.com ran pretty much right out of the box.

I also have working, in that version of firefox,  the latest and greatest flash plugin from get.adobe.com/flashplayer; flashplayer v24 for linux 32bit NPAPI; ~8Mb download.  Running the standalone flashplayer told me of missing .so dependencies I needed to add to my tc X11.  I then just looked up and installed the tcz's that provided them.

NOTE: It did take me several hours to figure out the flash plugin, mostly banging my head against the PPAPI version, freshplayer wrappers, the last version of Chrome's PepperFlash that I ripped from the Debian package, yadda yadda. It turns out the latest NPAPI version works just fine and is dead simple to install. Just copy into /usr using the instructions in the readme.

You can add the files to tc backup, but I just cp them back in from my home directory on startup with bootlocal.

I have my immediate goal.. a minimal X11 with the latest firefox and flash.
Next stop, a dev environment I can compile from sources when needed and make tcz's.

Regards,
/Lindsay

[coreplayer2]

I tried the firefox and flash tcz's in the tce repo but neither worked for me and it wasn't clear at the time what I was missing.

Clearly your basic TC installation is missing some key dependencies, along with possibly missing firefox & flashplayer dependencies.   I suggest downloading tinycore.iso and using the onboot.lst from it for your base install.   search the list to find and install missing deps.

In my testing today, I booted up a tinycore.ISO (previously burned to a CD), then using APPS (though you could also use tce-ab, it's just that searching for extensions is easier with APPS)

• installed alsa.tcz  (Loading in this order ensures the correct flash audio support modules are loaded during flashplayer extension creation)
• run alsamixer to un-mute any necessary controls (in my case this meant un-muting Master and SPDIF controls)
• installed and ran firefox_getLatest  (which installed firefox and all required deps)
• installed getFlash_beta (which installed the latest FlashPlayer and Alsa Audio support module and deps)

The above took less than 5 minutes. 
Then opened pandora.com which immediately began playing my fav. Online music



when You've fixed the installation I recommend using ezremaster.tcz to create an ISO of your current installation configured the way you like it whilst maintaining the onboot and ondemand menu hierarchy.

 
 

[lindsay]

Thanks. Sounds straightforward. I will try again.
It is quite possible my initial setup was broken...
/Lindsay

[coreplayer2]

The easy and most reliable solution is this:

• For a minimalist command line install; use Core-7.2.iso as base install
• For a minimalist graphical (desktop) environment; use TinyCore-7.2.iso as base install

Using tinycore.iso for the basic install will save much headbanging on desk later, I can attest to that.

OSS modules have been submitted, so very soon you'll find OSS in the repo  which should work in virtualbox (iirc) and needs no configuring.

Good luck