Announcing Starter Packs for v3.7 or newer 3.x series

[roberts]

For those of you who do not have net access with the base Tiny/Micro Core trying to
download the various tools, with their dependencies, and specific locations
can be an initial daunting task. In an effort to make things easier...

We have decided to offer, once again, the .gz as specialized extension starter
pack.

Note that .gz is much higher in the order of loading than tczs.

Individually specified via the bootloader = Highest priority.
Remaster only /opt/tce/*.gz = Second Highest priority
/tce/*.gz = Third Highest

And finally followed by:
/tce/optional/*.tcz

.gzs always load into ram, no mounting, no read-only, no startup scripts, no installed tracking,
no onboot, no ondemand, no scripts to edit, and no endless downloading of many dependencies.

They offer a single simple package download as pieces of a traditional remaster.

Think of .gzs as a "Poor Man's" remaster or a remaster by parts, multiple initial ram disks.
As a remaster they are quite different from extensions.

They will never become a tcz, as such it would be composite. Which would be extremely difficult to
maintain via normal processes, i.e., appsaudit.

gzs should be placed in the tce (top level) directory and not in tce/optional. gzs do not participate
in onboot, or ondemand. There is no need to be concerned about "order" of loading. Again, this should make it easy for first time use, as nothing to edit. Simply as part of the initial download of
Tiny Core also download to /tce. Upon boot it is ready to use.

Starting with v3.7, it is possible to use Windows to download a starter pack. Then from Tiny
Core, mount your Windows NTFS partition using the mount GUI tool. Then use Control
Panel->Load Starter Pack, to naviagte to and load the selected starter pack
from Windows. Using this method should be the easiest for Windows users.

By their definition, We don't expect to offer many starter packs.  And the tcz way will remain and in no way be affected by the .gzs.

When you no longer need a gz just delete it. As the gzs are never mounted. Always copied into ram.
 
Simply download a single file, network.gz,  and you should have the needed tools to get online.

Want to install Tiny Core or Micro Core to a hard drive, frugal, or to a
pendrive, either USB-HDD or USB-ZIP, using Syslinux? Then grab the single file install.gz to
access the new TC Installation GUI, tc-install.

Do you want to install Tiny Core into a single directory on your existing NTFS
Windows file system? Then grab the single files grub4dos.gz and use the GUI
installer, tc-grub4dos.

See: http://distro.ibiblio.org/tinycorelinux/3.x/starterpacks/
or directly from the downloads page: http://distro.ibiblio.org/tinycorelinux/downloads.html

Use this section of the forum to discuss starter packs.

Edited content and name change to Starter Packs as it more accurately describes intended use.

[roberts]

After initial announcement, we now have more clarity of the goals for starter packs.
We have listened to concerns on their initial use and access, to that end, v3.7 has new features to access NTFS and therefore the loading of starter packs directly from NTFS from a running Tiny Core system.

Updated content of announcement post, and README.txt on http://distro.ibiblio.org/tinycorelinux/3.x/starterpacks/

Both starter packs have also been renamed:
network-tools.gz and install-tools.gz

[roberts]

Updated content of announcement post, and README.txt on http://distro.ibiblio.org/tinycorelinux/3.x/starterpacks/

Starter packs have also been renamed:
network.gz , install.gz, and grub4dos.gz.