Thanks for TinyCore!

[PDP-8]

I just wanted to say thanks for TinyCore and all of devs and users who work on it.

Because it means many different things to people, I won't bore you with how much I like it.

A lot of hardware and distros have passed under the bridge since I crawled out from CP/M and DOS back in 1995, but there have been 3 very memorable moments in my Unix career where I sat back in the chair and said "wow."

1) Installing Slackware from floppies in '96 or so.
2) Seeing my Apple G5 PPC iMac boot and run X with a PPC port of Crux.
3) Running TinyCore in various configurations.

I'm not a developer or power-user.  I just want to learn things that go beyond mere installation, and TinyCore is teaching me a whole new way to look at things.

Enough of that I suppose.   Thanks to all - TC really brightened up my day.

[Misalf]

I just want to learn things that go beyond mere installation, and TinyCore is teaching me a whole new way to look at things.

Well said. Ditto.  ; )

[PDP-8]

I know one isn't supposed to blog here, but the more I wrench on TC and piCore, the more I appreciate the efforts put into them from devs and users.

Underlying the "tiny" extensible concept is something that for me was missing from other canned distros - as good as they are - is ** elegance ** in design.  Fixing some of the rough edges yourself is sooo gratifying.

No big shakes, but today tested a Chromebook's ability to download, unzip, and burn a piCore image to a card (used dd in the CB's "developer mode" to do that - no crouton etc)

AND, the Fifth browser is totally stable on the forum here once I turned off images.  And gave the bios / config.txt of the piCore a little boost in gpu memory.  Learned a little something the hard way - by reading.

Not a big deal for most I suppose, but I'm stoked!  Keep up the good work everybody!

[bmarkus]

No big shakes, but today tested a Chromebook's ability to download, unzip, and burn a piCore image to a card (used dd in the CB's "developer mode" to do that - no crouton etc)

Very interesting  What is the result, does piCore run on Chromebook?

[PDP-8]

I suppose it could, but my intent was just to use the developer tools to burn a card with dd.  I returned the CB back to a normal setup when I was done.

That was kind of me just wondering "what if a user/student's only exposure to computing was their chromebook, and wanted to burn a card to run on a pi?"
 
Normally most of us have come through the ranks of older hardware, but this situation could potentially come up with younger users, so I wanted to be prepared.

Without repeating too much, the gist though of running TC / Picore on a CB is this:

1) Sole os only:  not all models have the bios support to have TC be the sole os.  Better have your hardware support down pretty nicely.

2) Hybrid - ChromeOs running TC in a chroot environment (crouton makes this easy.  I suppose one could write their own crouton script for TC to do this - details on the github crouton project.)

Problems for me:  I'm done battling with bios issues.  Had enough with supposedly "open firmware" getting Crux-PPC to run on my G5 iMac.  Fan control was always a problem on my model.

Chromeos hybrid - I haven't found any *guarantee* that the ability to run a chroot underneath in developer mode (and all that pertains to security wise) won't be taken away by a managerial decision upon the next os update that is pushed out to all users.  Unlikely, but I'm not going to take that chance.

With the Pi, (or TC with already established hardware) *I'm* in sole control of my hardware and operational environment.

I think it might be a fun experiment / project for some, but for me, TC/Picore is more about learning and improving my skills closer to the metal, rather than just setting up or trying to emulate a turn-key environment.  But that's me.  Not to mention the keyboard's escape-key probably won't stand up to my pounding away in vi.

[PDP-8]

Re: burning the image from a chromebook...

My burn from the developer mode was a very simple dd mode.  However, it did not seem to unmount properly whene done.  Nevertheless, it still booted fine in the pi, and after expansion, seems to work.

Further research indicates that I may have been better off disabling the CB's power saver with "stop powerd" and also including "iflag = dsync" and "oflag=dsync" along with a proper "bs=xx" blocksize.

These additional values I did not try, and since the image size is so small, the command completed, but did not unmount properly.

Without turning this into a chromebook forum, I just thought I'd point that out in case anyone runs into trouble.