TinyCorePure64 and Porteus mashup!

[PDP-8]

I sometimes use Porteus on my uefi-only machines, and thought I'd document how easy it is to incorporate Tinycorepure64 into it for those cantankerous modern machines out there.

This is a general project note and is not intended for total newbs to either system!

TL;DR - I used Porteus 64 live-image as the bootloader for TinyCore 64 bit.

Tinycore is very easy to incorporate into Porteus as the boot host.  You can find the latest more or less rolling here.  I used Porteus-v5.0rc3.  (it comes out almost yearly since being based on Slackware, waiting for THAT to be officially released is waiting for the other shoe to drop.)  And no, you can't just dd it.  Porteus is simply copied to a drive, and then either run the windows exe or the linux shell script to make it bootable.  BUT, like Coreplus, this is ONLY the installer, and nothing will be saved.  See Porteus for more info on making a daily driver.

Notification and links to the rc3 images:
https://forum.porteus.org/viewtopic.php?f=35&t=9716

Similar to us, a great team of enthusiastic users and very smart devs.  Lets marry them together, but you know the rule:  if it breaks, you get to keep both pieces, so don't bug the devs!!  Ie, this mashup isn't really intended for a distro-hopper.

Very simple.  Simply copy the 64 bit TC distribution files vmlinuz64 and corepure64.gz into this directory onto your Porteus stick:

/boot/syslinux

Now edit /boot/syslinux/porteus.cfg and add the following somewhere in the menu setup:

Code: [Select]

MENU SEPARATOR
LABEL TinyCore
MENU  Run TinyCorePure64
KERNEL /boot/syslinux/vmlinuz64
INITRD /boot/syslinux/corepure64.gz
APPEND waitusb=5 showapps tce
TEXT HELP
     My feeble attempt to run
     TinyCore64 with Porteus as
     a boot host.
END TEXT

MENU SEPARATOR

So now when you boot, you'll be presented with a menu to choose tinycore64 to boot into, in addition to the usual Porteus choices.  You of course will be a bit skilled in TC, and either be prepared to set your drive, or have a pre-configured tce directory installed somewhere.  The TinyCorePure64 iso is handy for nabbing all the files needed to get started if you extract them.

Being able to boot into Porteus is also kind of handy in case you totally hose your TC installation and need to use tools to rectify or change it back into working order.

So what to call this:  Tinyus - Portycore.  Whatever.  It is an interesting and I think useful combo where we help each other!

[PDP-8]

Please note to anyone attempting to do this:

If you try shutting down Porteus graphically, the system *may* not actually shutdown all the way.  They're working on it.

In order to preserve the hard work you've put into it and TinyCore just in case, from Porteus shutting down from the commandline always shuts down clean

Code: [Select]

sudo poweroff
Use the well known and publicized password of "toor".

[PDP-8]

Ah, an unofficial solution exists if a shutdown is an issue.  Remove the slim lockfile is one of them.

edit as root:
/etc/rc.d/rc.local_shutdown

Add

Code: [Select]

rm -f /var/run/slim.lock

On another front, if X11 is respawning too fast and giving you 5 minute waits, adding a small sleep helps.

edit as root:
/etc/rc/d/rc.4

add a small timer loop prior to calling slim - just a couple of secs will do:

Code: [Select]

sleep 5
Running the RC's, and possibly seeing the "Not a Com32r image" ?  It's being worked on.  In the meantime..

Just hit TAB.  A non-graphical menu of choices to boot will appear.

Porteus is still unmatched for installation.  No 3rd-party utils needed.  And for most modern hardware, simply mounting the iso, copying the files to a drive and rebooting results in a working system.  Even my uefi-only super-cranky machines.

That's all it takes.  In windows, that means just double-clicking the iso to mount it, and copy and paste the files to a drive.  *SOME* weird hardware might need to have the usb installer (exe or shell script) run, but that's it.  Most of my machines dont.

And, as much as I like mounting isos from the commandline to do stuff like this, the SpaceFM file manager that is included will do it for you if you like.

Porteus is about the only thing I've seen where you can simply cut-n-paste the distribution files onto a filesystem, and have it be recognized and boot.  Mind blower.

It has become my favorite host machine for doing TC work too.