Thanks for the comment Greg and I agree with you 100%. I also don't think anything documented in this thread is really of much benefit and maybe only marginally useful in certain applications.
That said, most of the stuff in this thread is half just experimenting, starting with "I wonder if this would work..." and then tinkering around until it does. For me it's fun and a good way to learn some of the under the hood mechanics of what's going on.
But there's also part of me that thinks that piCore lends itself to appliance type applications with single (not necessarily simple) functions. In that case what do you really want? The core OS, a fixed set of extensions and a basically static configuration. I'm probably not the only one that uses Windows as my daily driver OS, not because I don't like Linux, I do, I just use Windows on my desktop. For me, I'd prefer that piCore be distributed as a zip file rather than a disk image. I'd rather just use a "big" fat partition and unzip the piCore OS files to it. Put my fixed set of extra extensions on it and go. The disk image, fixed fat partition, stub second partition that needs to be expanded (which isn't readable by windows) is just sort of nuisance - in my opinion - for the things I've used piCore for to date.
I've found a way to do it the way I want to do it that seems to work ok and to me just feels more "simple". piCorePlayer is a nice customization of piCore and really is a very useful product for a lot of people. I've used it and it worked great. It's also good that you've found the standard piCore to be robust, though I would point out that the "Into the Core" book makes these statements:
It should be noted that using a bulk selection, that is, loading all
extensions to RAM, allows the storage to be unmounted, and the
system to avoid any corruption on power loss.
It’s desirable to be able to turn off our system by the power switch,
making the kiosk more reliable in the event of power loss.
To do this, enable copy2fs via the Toggle default install to file
system option in Apps. Now all extensions are loaded to RAM.
As the final step, we will unmount the disk after the boot has
completed. This will prevent any corruption from getting to the disk,
enabling clean shutdowns via the power switch.
Anyway, I feel like this post might begin to sound defensive which is not my intent. I'm really not trying to push anything on anyone here, really just documenting some experimentation publicly rather than just sending notes to myself via email.
As a side note, if anyone wants to use the single fat partition method, I think an easy way to prep the card for making a filetool backup to the root of the fat partition is to pull the default mydata.tgz out the "1" partition of the disk image via 7zip and dropping it into the root of the fat partition. piCore will pick up the location on first boot (it wouldn't if there wasn't one there to begin with) and filetool.sh -b will work without issue.
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