I've volunteered to setup and maintain a small computer lab (3 machines) in a retirement community. I use donated hardware which, of course, is outdated. I'm interested in exploring tinycore as the OS that will run on these machines. Thus the following initial points and questions.
The machines currently run DSL (2 of the 3) and Fluxbuntu (1 of the 3). So I now have Linux installed on these computers, and they all boot with GRUB. For the initial test install what I'm hoping to do is to copy necessary files to the primary partition/filesystem of one of the machines, then add a GRUB boot entry pointing to those files. I assume it will be possible to do this?
First of all I'll need to point GRUB to the kernel: I've managed to locate bzImage at
http://distro.ibiblio.org/pub/linux/distributions/tinycorelinux/2.x/release/distribution_files/, so that seems fairly straightforward. At that same address I see tinycore.gz, doubtless the compressed filesystem containing the rest of the distro. What I don't see there or anywhere else is an initramfs or similar. Of course that's an optional GRUB entry but most modern distros use an initial RAM disk, as I understand it.
So I will need some clarification on this. Is tinycore.gz both an initramfs and a the filesystem the OS runs from once booted? In other words, can I specify something like initramfs=/tinycore/tinycore.gz in my GRUB entry and expect that to work (having specified something like kernel=/tinycore/bzImage as well, of course)? Or do I maybe need to loop-mount the iso and extract the initramfs from there--it not being available for separate download?
This pretty well completes my intial query. Answers to the above questions and/or additonal tips or pointers will be appreciated.
Thanks,
James
PS After testing and confirming the suitability of this distro for mylittle lab, I'd probably opt for something like the mount option for a more permanent installation of tinycore.