Questions regarding TinyCore/dCore and Xorg

[x6herbius]

Hi,

I've recently been trying to get either TinyCore or dCore up and running on an old HP Pavilion tx1000 laptop, mainly for my own amusement. Both work fine from a live USB, in trimmed-down and "plus" versions, so I'm now trying to get either distro installed permanently on the hard drive.

I've avoided installing the "plus" versions because I'd quite like to be able to avoid all the extra unnecessary extensions that are provided with these versions (particularly as the laptop doesn't currently have functional WiFi due to a hardware issue, so the WiFi extensions would be redundant). However, I'm running into problems trying to get Xorg to work properly from the base distro. This may just be my relative lack of experience setting up a Linux desktop environment completely from scratch, so I'm hoping I might be able to get some pointers to move me in the right direction.

dCore has a great many different Xorg-related packages available for download, but when I attempt to follow http://wiki.tinycorelinux.net/doku.php?id=dcore:xorg-video_driver_packages for installing a specific driver (the laptop has an old and slightly weird nVIDIA chipset), I don't see a package for xorg-nvidia. I do see xorg-nv listed, but looking at the package online it says that this has been superceded by nouveau; however, "xorg-nouveau" is not actually an available package for dCore. I think the closest is something like xorg-server-video-nouveau (I can't quite remember the exact name), but installing that didn't seem to help.

Installing xorg-all did allow me to have the desktop visible, but it wasn't clear exactly which video driver within this package was actually being used. Additionally, loading xorg-all at boot increased the loading time significantly (I had to wait a couple of minutes for it to successfully load), so I'd rather not use that package if I can help it.

After trying various things with dCore, I decided to try normal TinyCore instead. It seems to load an awful lot faster than dCore did - I'm assuming this is because dCore has more overhead given it works with Debian and Ubuntu packages? Regardless, I still couldn't quite get Xorg to work - I downloaded graphics-5.10.3-tinycore64 and Xorg-7.7, and set up an Xorg.conf file, but when I run startx it just loads a black screen. I'm assuming this is because I need to install a window manager of some sort, so I tried downloading flwm_topside, but I'm not 100% clear on how to integrate this manually with Xorg.

Can anyone point me in the right direction for how to get all of this stuff set up?

Many thanks.

[Juanito]

With standard tinycore you need either Xvesa, Xfbdev or Xorg-7.7 and flwm, aterm and wbar.

[x6herbius]

With standard tinycore you need either Xvesa, Xfbdev or Xorg-7.7 and flwm, aterm and wbar.

I gather that Xvesa is outdated now? Is Xfbdev an up-to-date replacement?

[Juanito]

Both are old, but lightweight.

[Rich]

Hi x6herbius
Welcome to the forum.

... Both work fine from a live USB, in trimmed-down and "plus" versions, ...

So it sounds like you get to a working GUI.

... I've avoided installing the "plus" versions because I'd quite like to be able to avoid all the extra unnecessary extensions that are provided with these versions  ...

The  plus  version includes the  tc-install  utility. You don't need to install the wireless stuff. Under  Install Type , select
Core and X/GUI Desktop  and leave the other options unchecked:
http://tinycorelinux.net/install.html#5_

[x6herbius]

Oh cool! That's not what my installer looked like, maybe I was using the wrong package or something. I'll give it another go and see what happens.

[polikuo]

Oh cool! That's not what my installer looked like, maybe I was using the wrong package or something. I'll give it another go and see what happens.

Hi, section 5 is only valid when you use CorePlus ISO or CorePlus physical CD/DVD.