A new start with dCore - Help needed

[Sashank999]

Hi !

I am a newbie to dCore. I have used TCL v11 for some days.
I have an UEFI Laptop. I can disable secure boot so no worries about that.
I am trying to live boot dCore x86_64 from my 2GB USB and I care very much about internet data usage.
I want Wifi and GUI on my laptop. From my previous experience on TCL, I found that I need firmware-iwlwifi.tcz as the driver.
I went to http://tinycorelinux.net/dCore/x86_64/release/ from Downloads page but it has many folders and I don't know which I have to download.
I want the downloads to be as minimal as possible, even though it is time taking or some effort is required.
Is there any instructions sheet that I must follow to do so ? Or can you say the steps to follow so that I can do it ?

[Jason W]

Hi Sashank999.  The problem with only downloading the minimal packages needed to set up dCore with wireless is that you must first use dCorePlus to access the network to download those components.  And if you download dCorePlus, you already have what you need for GUI and wireless.  Do you have a machine you can use where there is no concern about bandwidth usage?  If so you can download dCorePlus and use dd to write it to a usb which will be UEFI bootable.  And then boot dCorePlus, and in that session use dCore-usbinstall to create a UEFI bootable USB for the laptop that has it's TCE directory on that USB and can be used with persistence across boots. 

How did you go about using standard Core on this laptop?  Tell me your steps and I will let you know how to replicate it with dCore with only the minimal packages needed.  Thanks.

[amuctued]

dcore stretch works with debian9 repo, buster with debian10, while bionic and focal work with ubuntu. Ubuntu is bloatware so a debian flavor is the way to go. Stretch is lighter than buster, so stretch is my personal choice.

Whether you want dcore or dcoreplus is a personal choice. dcoreplus comes with gui and wireless support, while dcore initially is much lighter.

It's whether you want to use the automated tool dCore-usbinstall or do the manual install. I've tried dCore-usbinstall but it either produces the efi boot or the mbr boot. Either-or but I wanted both so I went the manual route: put the vmlinuz and gz files on a fat partition and installed syslinux manually both for mbr and efi. dCore-usbinstall OTOH formats into a linux filesystem (ext2 I think) so it uses extlinux for mbr or grub for efi.

The wiki on this site didn't work for me for some reason, so I used this http://wiki.tinycorelinux.net/doku.php?id=dcore:welcome

[Sashank999]

Ok.
I actually forgot that I asked this thread. Sorry about the late reply.

I said that I downloaded a Core with minimal tools.
Rich had a script which is called tce-fetch.sh. I used that and downloaded the minimal packages I need like Xvesa, flwm_topside, wifi.tcz, wireless_tools.tcz, libiwlwifi.tcz. I have a bash shell installed on my system (git bash, to be exact). Also an ash shell via the busybox windows build on their official website.
And then I manually downloaded the TCL no wifi version and then added the wifi tczs I downloaded with above said tce-fetch.

I have used TCL but what I don't like is that it doesn't have apt. I really like the tools available with other GitHub repos like Lazy Script which work only with some packages from Debian repo. TCL Repo doesn't have these and I can't port these many packages myself either. So, I just think dCore will be enough.

[amuctued]

I've started with corepure64 and saw right away it wasn't going to do because the assortment of packages it comes with is even smalller than that of core. I wanted 64 bit desktop so I didn't even bother with core.

dcore came as a pleasant surprise. While the debian package structures are nowhere near minimal by my standards, I still like dcore. What I found is that there's still a way to slim things down some by avoiding certain meta packages.

For example the wiki calls for a xorg-all install. I so far found it's enough for me to have just xserver-base installed instead. I compared the resulting space taken numbers to that of alpine linux and yes alpine still wins. But hey dcore is glibc based and these are debian packages. Still very nice

[Juanito]

The packages are user submitted, if you don’t see what you want request it or, better still build and submit it.

[cast-fish]

Hello Forum,

Dcore, seems excellent. The requirements for Gui "interface" are user choices.

The package man ---- it facilitates it.   (UserLand)

Thx

C