I'm getting there, maybe .......
On coreplayer2's suggestion about a smaller ISO, I
downloaded and installed to a USB stick the
standard TinyCore 18mb .iso.
It has only 4 initial boot options. After considerable
messing around, I managed to get the 4th option,
command-line only, waitusb=5, to come up using
the modified boot command:
/boot/vmlinuz agp=off vga=791 loglevel=3 waitusb=5 initrd=/boot/core.gz
Even that boot up was peculiar. I had to enter the command on
4 separate tries, powering the machine off between tries, to
eventually make it work. I don't know why the machine is so
balky. I ran a memtest86 test, and the memory checked out
o.k., so I don't know what else could be wrong.
Having finally achieved an initial command prompt, I entered the
same 2 commands as shown in my initial post, except I used
flwm_topside instead of fluxbox.
After the startx, the graphic interface came up, and I used the
standard frugal install, with extlinux as the default boot loader.
In my initial install, I had used grub, so as mentioned by
polikuo, extlinux should be sufficient.
On successive reboots, Tiny Core came up on the Toshiba,
but only in command line mode. I'm hoping I can install
something with the command line AB installer, to get the
graphics working, but I don't know yet.
I believe the graphics should work, because they looked
ok after the startx command using the USB stick.
Len E.