Tiny Core Base > TCB Talk
MicroCore, Anyone?
philip:
--- Quote from: jpeters on March 28, 2009, 09:46:15 PM ---I think tc needs to be more sophisticated, as Robert indicated.
--- End quote ---
I agree with both of you, and my initial post says the same thing. It's interesting, though, how the term "sophisticated" could spin both ways. The standard public version of TC should clearly have the full functionality it offers now: that makes it sophisticated in its operation. The barebones version I am suggesting as an add-on (not a replacement!) would require sophistication from its users, rather than in the ISO.
Thanks to all who have contributed so far. Let's keep this interesting topic alive.
jpeters:
It becomes a silly game, really. TC loads 40 loops almost instant on. You can remaster TC in about 5 minutes, and strip out everything you don't want. Don't forget, it takes some time to boot your computer up to the grub menu.
I think a few people get overly hung up on "tiny", to the detriment of what an OS is for. I suppose it's possible to have an 8M core that doesn't work with anything. It'll boot up .5 seconds faster than TC does now. Look at all the work that went into keeping DSL small, and check out their latest ratings. IMHO, the core should have been upgraded a long time ago. TC works with modern software/hardware, and will rapidly diminish in value to the extent that it only supports "old" applications/hardware....even if it's only 10M.
curaga:
Sizewise it really doesn't matter whether we are 10mb or 8mb without X, jwm, fltk.. Everybody has at least 16 mb CF cards ;)
Even for burning into a bios chip, for which TC is not quite meant for, wouldn't work, since most bios chips are 1mb.
As for the public iso, I think it would be rather easy to keep both additional tce directory support and to have jwm.tcz et al loaded to ram inside tinycore.gz in order to still stay boot device-agnostic. Just, say, putting them to /tmp, and having some tce-loads in bootlocal.sh. With our current tcz loading speed it wouldn't hurt much at all.
@jpeters: why so negative prediction? updates will come as necessary (and no, flash is not necessary), in fact soon the kernel .29 might be seen around here. More and better HW support, I'd say ;)
Jason W:
Just for kicks I removed out of tinycore.gz all that relates to X, the fltk apps, and brought the size of the iso down to 6.3MB. I put all that I removed into an extension so I could have it back with one command. I booted in 10 seconds on my modest machine and was sitting on 18.7MB of used RAM. I added the extension back on and then started X and added my usual apps like nothing was different.
In theory such a setup would boot on a 24MB machine and could use tce's/tcz's for server functions like nfs-utils or other small apps, theory because I don't own a machine that size but I am sure it would work. A simple script, like restore-desktop or other such name, could fetch and restore what was missing. Or one could hand pick what they wanted if they knew what they were doing, but if you bring in any of the X related stuff it all kind of goes together. One would not have to very savvy to boot with a text mode TC, but one would have to be a little bit to make use of a text mode TC outside of restoring the desktop.
While I am not pushing for this to happen officially, a text mode tinycore makes perfect sense to me and is not hard to make for oneself. I looked to see what in base depends on libstdc++ besides the fltk apps and didn't see anything but I could have overlooked a dependency on it. That would bring the iso size to a little over 6.5Mb if it was put back in.
jpeters:
--- Quote from: curaga on March 29, 2009, 04:16:26 AM ---
@jpeters: why so negative prediction? updates will come as necessary (and no, flash is not necessary), in fact soon the kernel .29 might be seen around here. More and better HW support, I'd say ;)
--- End quote ---
I think it sounded more negative than intended. I began thinking (yes...after becoming aware of the glibc issue..) that it might be nice to have two versions going, one focused on 'small as possible' and another focused more on Robert's brilliant modular approach, yet maintaining updated core libraries (eg, Glibc, GCC, Binutils) and hardware support. I'd predict the latter will make it up the charts in DistroWatch (if anyone cares).
Meanwhile, I'm learning how to make my own. (BTW....I'd highly recommend recommend Robert Love's book, "Linux Kernel Development", which is actually readable for hobby-ists like myself).
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