dCore-focal

[Jason W]

Work on dCore-focal has begun.  It is using Ubuntu Focal Fossa.  Ubuntu Focal Fossa is to be released in April 2020, but it is never too soon for me to start the work to make this Ubuntu release into a dCore. 

[sm8ps]

Hi Jason, I hope you are doing fine! I have some Corona-induced spare time to work on my computers. I wanted to add an entry about printing to the wiki but that seems to be down since a couple of days. Looking around in the forum, it seems eerily quiet, too. I sincerely do hope that development has not halted in the meantime! Do you still plan on releasing dCore-focal anytime soon?
Sincerely, Stefan

[Jason W]

Hi sm8ps.  I have been sidetracked recently as my 64 bit PC died on me, my new one has arrived and hopefully I will be back at it soon.  I also notice the quiet in this part of the forum, but I am hoping that means things are just working as they should.  Either way, dCore is useful I think and the final release of Ubuntu Focal is the 23rd of this month so it is not too early for a dCore-focal.   

[sm8ps]

Great news! I support your point of view about dCore working just the way it should. And it is much more than simply useful, it is miraculous! It makes things possible like running a 2018 OS on Centrino hardware from 2005 better than on the crappy 2018 laptop with a traditional installation. Many thanks for all your efforts, Jason!

[steppeno]

I'm waiting too 
Great work Jason

[jls]

Hi
I'm not using dCore anymore.
I'm using standard distro.
best regards

[sm8ps]

Goodbye and arrivederci, JLS! I am sure you will be back sometime.

[Onyarian]

I'm still here, and hope for long time, dCore wihout problems in my Pc's

[Jason W]

dCore-focal64 is now uploaded to release candidates. 

http://tinycorelinux.net/dCore/x86_64/release_candidates/dCore-focal64/

[sm8ps]

Awesome, thank you so much, JasonW! Looking forward to testing as soon as possible. Will take some time though.

[Jason W]

dCorePlus-focal64.iso and dCore-focal64.iso are now bootable with both BIOS and UEFI systems.  My current machine has an option to boot with either BIOS or UEFI, so I was able to test the ISOs.  I was able to boot dCore-focal64.iso and dCorePlust-focal64.iso with both BIOS and UEFI, and both with being burned to a CDROM, and also to usb using the dd command.  Please test them, and if they are good, I plan to make all the 64 bit dCore ISOs this way.  32 bit PCs are old, and I don't think there is a point to having UEFI with the 32 bit dCores. 

[PDP-8]

FOCAL ROCKS on UEFI-ONLY!

Just wow.  On my modern uefi-only machines, it was EASY to get the 64 bit dCorePlus up and running on a stick:

1)  dd from unix.  No problems.

2)  Windows: Etcher no problem.  Rufus with gpt and dd options.  No problem.

3)  Chromebook: renaming the dCore iso to a .bin suffix, and using the Chromebook's own restore utility, it burned dCore just fine and booted on my pc of course.  Not used for chromebook.

4) Macintosh - I'm sure dd would work.  Other common burners would probably work, but since I don't have one, I can't test.

FLUXBOX!  I didn't expect that!  As much as I like TC, this was a refreshing change, even though all my old familiar utils were there.

Nice work Jason!

This kind of guarantees the future of dCore, where even youngsters with shaky experience of partitioning, formatting, and installing bootloaders, can get up and running fast - and then turning into gray-beards like us on their own time.

Just awesome.

[PDP-8]

Addendum:  Love the flexibility of this new iso format.

3rd party burners:

Etcher - one handy thing about it is that after a burn, it verifies it, unlike most other utils that merely write.  This can catch flaky / counterfeit drives at times.  So even if you don't plan to use it regularly, it can be a diagnostic tool.

Rufus - (always use the latest) - has the option of putting a persistence partition on the same stick.  Works fine with dCore.  But to do so, make sure you use gpt and not mbr.  And of course the dd method when prompted.  The partition is even labeled "persistence" and shows up nicely when you hover with the mount tool.  Oh, calculates md5's or sha's too on your iso file.  Handy.

I suppose more advanced users could always shrink the existing dCore partition with say gparted, and create another one for persistence of their own choosing later if they want if they don't want to use Rufus' persistence partitioner.  Whatever, do your own thing.

I'm old-school, and use dCore / TC on it's own physical device, and my tce directory on another physically different filesystem, but thought I'd bring that Rufus thing up.

I moved my boot and data sticks from machine to machine (Intel NUC's, inexpensive hockey-puck mini-pc's, my Acer laptop, and dCore never had a problem finding the data device holding tce.  Well, it did once, but all I had to do was use the standard dCore util, like tce-setdrive, or bang it out manually with UUID's, or simply just specifying the LABEL of my drive.  Usual stuff - not a problem.

So I'm pretty stoked at the flexibility that focal iso brings to the table.

[PDP-8]

Focal (cli only) - what a blast.

dd'ed the simple dCore focal, and like Plus, I had a blast and no problem booting in on any eufi-only box.

Within minutes I was doing my usual schtick - downloading the latest busybox from project site, stealing terminus console fonts from other distros, (using busybox's setfont to bring them up) links, joe, sc, all the usual suspects.

Other than custom creating my own stick with a writable filesystem to make grub.cfg editable, any change of making "multivt" a standard, rather than the exception?  No biggie.

Fun - love this stuff!  Again, nice job.

[Jason W]

Hi PDP-8.  Thanks for testing across the methods you did, I only can test presently with dd and burning to cdrom.  dCore-usbinstall does install a UEFI bootable USB when the UEFI option is chosen, but if you are booting with a dCore-focal UEFI USB key that was created with the dd command, right now dCore-usbinstall will not be able to use that same USB key to install to.  I will see what I can do about that. 

As for the multivt option being standard, I aim to keep things the same as regular Core when I can.  That fluxbox is being used for dCorePlus is because there was an issue with FLWM, and I have not found what it is yet. 

Thanks again for testing.