I am posting this from a Dell Mini 9. It is the base model. 1GB ram and 4GB SSD. It came with Ubuntu.
The SSD is seen as hda with a tiny first partition, id de Unknown, the second partition, hda2 is home to Ubuntu.
I started off by editing the existing grub menu at /mnt/hda2/boot/grub/menu.lst
First comment out the hidemenu, then add a typical Tiny Core boot entry.
title Tiny Core Linux
kernel (hd0,1)/tinycore/bzImage quiet embed ht=on hpet=disabled quiet tz=PST+8PDT,M3.2.0/2,M11.1.0/2 home=hda2 opt=hda2 norestore nodhcp
initrd (hd0,1)/tinycore/tinycore.gz
I created a tinycore directory on /mnt/hda2/tinycore and then copied via pendrive the bzImage and tinycore.gz files.
The grub line as above shows that I want to have user tc added to the existing /home from currently setup from Ubunutu.
Same for /opt. I will share the current /opt directory for my persistent storage. With both persistent opt and home I chose norestore.
Note that I only created the tinycore directory and copied two files. The rest Tiny Core handles automatically.
Once I rebooted I was running tinycore. However, you will need some support files from the repository for wireless and proper screen resolution.
Again, using the pendrive, I placed the following extensions on the pendrive.
1. wireless-2.6.29.1-tinycore.tczm
2. wireless_tools.tczl
3. wl.tczm
4. 915resolution.tcz
The first three are for wireless and 915resolution is for native screen 1024x600
Copy these from pendrive to /mnt/hda2/tce
The wireless card in my mini9 is eth1, so I next edited /opt/bootlocal.sh adding:
iwconfig eth1 essid "mynetworkname" key FDFDFDFD
udhcpc -i eth1
I shutdown the mini9 and upon next boot I have wireless and proper screen resoultion!
Now from the mini9 I grabbed OSS, opera, getFlash10
Sound worked without any configuration. Opera started up fine. Then ran getFlash10 from the menu.
Now youtube video and sound work fine. Be sure to edit Opera preferences to limit cache size,
or the browser that you may choose instead.
That's it mini9 with Tiny Core has been awesome. Boots much faster than Ubuntu. Browser works better than Ubuntu. Videos play better too. In fact, I have now removed Ubuntu from the SSD.