Can someone make a guide for stupids?

[mikezuccaburg]

Hi guys,

I am trying to get TinyCore going in order to maximize the small amount of RAM available on my netbook (2GB) for basic text editing, web browing, and etc.

All the guides out there refer to burning the ISO to a CD, and I was wondering if there are any workarounds.  I tried mounting the ISO to a virtual drive, but no dice.  I also tried making a bootable USB with unetbootin...that was a bad idea.  It kept booting to a command prompt to the point that I had to reinstall Lubuntu.

I have looked at the Quick Start Guide and this and that and I am just wondering, in simple terms, how I can go from having a flash drive to running this OS without a CD burner.

Thanks in advance for any guidance you guys can provide.  I downloaded the 100+ mb "core" file rather than the advanced ones.

[Rich]

Hi mikezuccaburg
Did you read this section from the FAQ:

How to use pendrives and other removable devices with Tiny Core?

 Installing Core to USB pendrives is easily accomplished with Core's tc-install extension which is provided on CorePlus.

 Therefore it is highly recommended to use CorePlus, much work has gone into this to make an easy and effortless installations for both hard drive and USB pendrives with whatever window manager you prefer. See the video provided.

 For those users coming from Windows there is now an installation tool just for you. Core2usb is a Windows native program that make it easy to install Core from downloaded iso file to bootable pendrive. Core2usb can be found on Sourceforge.

 Note using other third party installation tools, such as, unetbootin is not and cannnot be automatic. Obviously unetbootin does not "know" about our distribution, i.e., not listed in the drop choices. Therefore using unetbootin simply copies the entire iso to target.

 On a cdrom we cannot have a tce dir. It would be READ_ONLY and nothing would work insofar as adding extensions. That is why there is a cde directory in the iso! It is also a fact that one cannot have two tce directores in the same partition. Nothing new about that,

 It should be obvious that one can use the TinyCore CD or the CorePlus CD READ_ONLY devices to process and access any tce directory on a writable store, i.e., works as expected.

 Therefore if one insists on using a third party installation tool and one that does not officially support Core and thereby copies the entirety of the TinyCore iso then you are faced with manual setup of either creating a second partition for your tce dir, or renaming the cde to tce thus indicating that this is not a CD and editing the syslinux.cfg changing cde to waitusb=5 to indicate that is a pendrive.

 It is not recommended to have a cde directory on any live working system. The whole point of modularity is the ability to easily upgrade the X/GUI extension separate from the base Core.

 Therefore in the case of unetbootin renaming cde to tce is required.

 Tiny Core supports UUID and LABELS.

 This is most helpful when using pendrives on different machines and you want to "anchor" your Tiny Core boot codes to a specific device.

 To find the UUID of a device use the command blkid
blkid -s UUID /dev/sda1

 You can mount devices by UUID with the mount command, e.g,
# mount -U 4773-DFE2

 The UUID tends to be long, so best to cut and paste into your menu.lst boot options.

 You can now specify the device to be used by UUID as follows:
tce=UUID=4773-DFE2 home=UUID=4773-DFE2 opt=UUID=4773-DFE2 restore=UUID=4773-DFE2

 Typically this is helpful when using pendrives, be sure to add the waitusb=5 option.

 Advanced users may add a specific device to wait for, with the time limit being the maximum time to wait:
waitusb=30:LABEL=tinycore
 waitusb=30:UUID=4773-DFE2

[NewUser]

Or if you have a new-ish Windows PC laying around, search sourceforge for core2usb. core2usb-1.6.exe works very well in putting the .iso onto a usb drive.

[mikezuccaburg]

Hi mikezuccaburg
Did you read this section from the FAQ:

How to use pendrives and other removable devices with Tiny Core?

 Installing Core to USB pendrives is easily accomplished with Core's tc-install extension which is provided on CorePlus.

 Therefore it is highly recommended to use CorePlus, much work has gone into this to make an easy and effortless installations for both hard drive and USB pendrives with whatever window manager you prefer. See the video provided.

 For those users coming from Windows there is now an installation tool just for you. Core2usb is a Windows native program that make it easy to install Core from downloaded iso file to bootable pendrive. Core2usb can be found on Sourceforge.

 Note using other third party installation tools, such as, unetbootin is not and cannnot be automatic. Obviously unetbootin does not "know" about our distribution, i.e., not listed in the drop choices. Therefore using unetbootin simply copies the entire iso to target.

 On a cdrom we cannot have a tce dir. It would be READ_ONLY and nothing would work insofar as adding extensions. That is why there is a cde directory in the iso! It is also a fact that one cannot have two tce directores in the same partition. Nothing new about that,

 It should be obvious that one can use the TinyCore CD or the CorePlus CD READ_ONLY devices to process and access any tce directory on a writable store, i.e., works as expected.

 Therefore if one insists on using a third party installation tool and one that does not officially support Core and thereby copies the entirety of the TinyCore iso then you are faced with manual setup of either creating a second partition for your tce dir, or renaming the cde to tce thus indicating that this is not a CD and editing the syslinux.cfg changing cde to waitusb=5 to indicate that is a pendrive.

 It is not recommended to have a cde directory on any live working system. The whole point of modularity is the ability to easily upgrade the X/GUI extension separate from the base Core.

 Therefore in the case of unetbootin renaming cde to tce is required.

 Tiny Core supports UUID and LABELS.

 This is most helpful when using pendrives on different machines and you want to "anchor" your Tiny Core boot codes to a specific device.

 To find the UUID of a device use the command blkid
blkid -s UUID /dev/sda1

 You can mount devices by UUID with the mount command, e.g,
# mount -U 4773-DFE2

 The UUID tends to be long, so best to cut and paste into your menu.lst boot options.

 You can now specify the device to be used by UUID as follows:
tce=UUID=4773-DFE2 home=UUID=4773-DFE2 opt=UUID=4773-DFE2 restore=UUID=4773-DFE2

 Typically this is helpful when using pendrives, be sure to add the waitusb=5 option.

 Advanced users may add a specific device to wait for, with the time limit being the maximum time to wait:
waitusb=30:LABEL=tinycore
 waitusb=30:UUID=4773-DFE2

I did...after I had tried it.  Haha.

Thanks NewUser, I will check that out.