Tiny Core Linux
Tiny Core Base => CorePlus => Topic started by: nurbles on July 17, 2023, 10:12:16 AM
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If this is the wrong forum for this, please direct me to the correct one and accept my apologies.
It has been a few years since I last built up a new TinyCore system. I'm trying to use TC again because my previous experience was excellent, but sadly this time that is not the case...
First, my "new" hardware uses an Intel Atom E3845, Quad Core processor with 8GB RAM and a 256GB SSD. (The exact device is a DFI model EC200-BTA881 https://www.dfi.com/product/index/218 (https://www.dfi.com/product/index/218).) OK, here's what's been happening:
- Any time the SSD has a hint of a bootable partition, the system seems to start it when I choose to boot with the 'X/GUI + Installer Extension' option from the TC boot menu. So I need to use a bootable GPartEd to delete the partition(s) on the SSD between every attempt to install. Annoying, but do-able.
- When I can get the ISO image to boot from CD (not a guarantee), it does not ever start the GUI and dumps me at a $ prompt. I'm hoping to use the graphical installer that I used in the past, so that's not good.
- When I boot the ISO from a USB stick (built with Rufus), I always get to the GUI and can start the GUI installer
When I run the GUI Installer, I also have some issues:
- The default location for the 'core*.gz' file(s) is a sort of a '^' char. This was with both the CorePlus and TinyCore images. I expected the installer to have the correct default built in, because I don't know what it should be.
- I have tried using /mnt/sdb1/boot with little success.
- When I try use the 'download' option, I've been choosing the 64-bit edition and it skips the questions about Install Type, WiFi, etc. that I get is I choose the local copy of core.gz from /mnt/sdb1/boot.
- The download option at least installs something bootable, but it only ever goes to a $ prompt and I don't know enough TinyCore to get the GUI and other things I want installed from there. (Yes, I'm a sad old man, sigh.)
- When installed using the /mnt/sdb1/boot/core.gz file, the system never actually boots. Some of the BIOS messages appear, the screen goes dark, there's a 'click' and we're back to the BIOS messages coming out. Repeat ad infinitum.
So, I'm sure this is something I'm doing wrong, but I'd swear that things worked much better in the past (valid defaults) and I don't think I ever needed to try to install TC more than once to get it working. Sometimes I'd need to reinstall because I screwed it up by poking something I shouldn't have touched, but it always "just worked" until *I* broke it. Now I can not even get it to start -- at least, not as it did in the past.
Can (will) anyone help me figure out what's wrong? Is my hardware not supported? Are there some specific requirements for booting from USB (or CD) that I'm not meeting? Could me SSD model be a problem? I'm at a loss here and praying for help!
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Hi nurbles,
Sad that You have no success yet with the fresh TinyCore. Have You tried the previous versions which worked ok for You on Your new hardware?
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The installer is presumably confused by the emulation that rufus does. Can you try dd'ing the iso to the usb stick instead of rufus?
Alternatively, the command to install the default desktop on a 64-bit command line would be "tce-load -wi Xfbdev Xlibs Xprogs wbar flwm aterm".
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Unfortunately I'm unable to help you, but I leave my personal opinion that TinyCore works much better portable, USB - I assume that's standard.
Additionally, currently TinyCore's EFI boot simply doesn't work because of bootx64.efi. Something I managed to get around by following the tutorial: https://www.parkytowers.me.uk/thin/Linux/TinycoreUSB_UEFI.shtml
TL;DR:
Format USB to FAT32
Extract Iso
Copy https://www.parkytowers.me.uk/thin/Linux/bootx64.efi to /EFI/BOOT/
Move /EFI/BOOT/grub/grub.cfg to /grub.cfg
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Thanks for the hints! Some comments:
- I tried several older versions that I still had around with similar results.
- It never occurred to me that Rufus could be the problem. I will try a dd, and perhals also UNetBootIn, and maybe the Universal-USB-Installer as well.
- Portable is fine, but not for a device embedded in a factory or things like that. I've found TC to be great for simple embedded devices because, by default it gives me a linux core, networking and little else unless I want to add it. The basic GUI is even fine because, while it costs very little when the device is operating "headless", if/when a customer needs to connect a monitor/keyboard/mouse it is much more familiar (and less daunting) to them.
- I'm not sure if this will have any effect, but the BIOS says it is configured for what it calls "dual boot" mode, supposedly supporting UEFI or legacy (or something like that.) I will set it to legacy and see if that helps.
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Hi nurbles,
1. I propose to use dd only. No enhancements, no bonus tracks.
2. In Your previous post You named the core path as /mnt/sdb1/boot. Have You rechecked whether core.gz really is there? I use TinyCore in nomadic manner, so I can't recheck it by myself.
3. A few years ago when I was starting with TC I used installer, mostly text mode. If I am not mistaken one choice point - something like "would You use the whole disk" - leaded to not successful installations. Have You read the Corebook's chapter about installation process?
4. Very nice description of distribution files based installation - http://forum.tinycorelinux.net/index.php/topic,19364.0.html. Have You read it? It describes dual boot mode for USB installation, but it can be easily applied to local hard drive, I guess.
PS
By the way I've booted CorePure64-14.0.iso in qemu and I was not able to find the path to core.gz ...
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By the way I've booted CorePure64-14.0.iso in qemu and I was not able to find the path to core.gz ...
Oops, I was to mount /dev/sr0 ... And in /mnt/sr0/boot the files were located.
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Well, thanks for the ideas, sadly I haven't gotten much farther.
Still working with current (14.0)...
- Rufus in 'dd' mode: No new results
- Changed BIOS to boot in LEGACY mode only: Same end results, but the USB boot 'looks' better and the GUI installer (from CorePlus) works as expected. Unable to install to an existing partition because the USB boot locks the existing partition for some reason and I cannot figure out any way to un-mount it.
- Tried using UNetbootin instead of Rufus: No new results
- Did internet search for 'corebook' and did not find what I expected. Eventually found the "Book" link on the TC home page (yes, sometimes I'm a bit slow) and re-read the installing section. I noticed that there is exactly ZERO help if something goes wrong. Not a hint about how to determine and/or correct the problem. Oh well. Oh, FWIW, my most recent attempt, using a CorePlus image followed every step exactly as the book showed it ... except for the last one: Instead of booting into TC, the machine boots to a black screen, then boots to a black screen, etc....
- I followed the link to the other forum discussion and read through (at least until it got contentious later on). I'm not really interested in something that requires so much hands-on effort just to get installed. That said, if a TC developer wants me to try a procedure of some sort, please let me know -- but be aware, I'm limited to using either a WSL Ubuntu 18 on Windows or reinstalling Ubuntu (or whatever) on my TC target machine if I need to use linux to build the stuff necessary.
Also FWIW, I tried installing Ubuntu on the same hardware and it worked flawlessly. However it takes an eternity to boot, which I why I was trying to use TC as it boots quite quickly. When it boots at all.
Sadly, I think I'm going to look at and try out some of the other minimal linux distros to see if I can any of them to work on my hardware. I'll check back here just in case someone has an epiphany, but I need to make forward progress on this project (I have a deadline to meet, after all.) :)
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Hi nurbles,
Prior to landing on TinyCore I was playing with Puppy Linux. Maybe it will be of interest for You. Nowadays the only minimalistic distro I know is Void Linux. If we are talking about using of some default installer and applying zero efforts. There are a plenty of others but kick-staring them may require some efforts applied.
Good luck!
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My problem isn't the work, it is that my installation will be "interesting", as in, "May you live in interesting times." That's why I prefer to have a standard installer & associated process that "just works."
Also, I tried Puppy, but apparently it is too complex for me as it, too, refused to boot after being installed to the SSD. It also felt slow, at least compared to TC. I tried Q40S, too, and it installed and booted fine, but it was the slowest option I've encountered so far (other than a full Ubuntu Server.)
I've currently got Proteus linux installed and it boots (and reboots) very quick, though it includes far more stuff than I have any need of or any use for. That's the other reason I would prefer TC: It can be installed with almost nothing included and that's just about everything I need! :)
I'll probably spend another day trying various combinations and maybe I will come up with one that works for TC. I need to codify the attempts I've made and compare that to all of the permutations I can imagine to ensure I've tried everything -- maybe I've missed the golden combination for my hardware. Fingers crossed.
Thanks again to everyone for providing hints, ideas and suggestions!
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hi *
idk how insightfull this might be ...
https://www.yoctoproject.org/pipermail/meta-intel/2015-September/003574.html#Atom-E3845: Grub auto start ?
wrt hw + tc
the implicet step is to install bootloader (pickone! ,.. examples afair exist in the wiki(if you can find a working link;) , ect )
then (with bldr installed) add an entry to the loader config to the corect drive/partition & file paths ( eg in second link below)
the above could even bee done on disk image file and then dd to *whatever* device
see also :
isohybrid bios uefi .ISO mk/test script qemu
https://forum.tinycorelinux.net/index.php/topic,23490.msg147162.html#msg147162
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example/script to copy tcl files to labled partition and create boot loader config (for grub2 in this case )
https://forum.tinycorelinux.net/index.php/topic,22546.msg141259.html#msg141259
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visited the specifications webpage for the hardware:
https://www.dfi.com/product/index/218#specification
under operating system support it says:
"Linux (Distribution available upon request)"
would be nice to know which one they offer/provide/recommend/support.
also, assuming your earlier post meant "Porteus" and not proteus
http://www.porteus.org/
20230720-0654am-cdt-usa-modified-added content
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Yes, "Porteus" not "Proteus", sorry. :) My bad, as it most definitely is not the computer from the movie "Demon Seed" (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0075931/ (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0075931/))!
I was reading some older posts about install/boot issues and came across a mention of the core2usb utility in the TC FAQ (pendrives). It sounded promising until I downloaded it and discovered:
- It is a python source file, apparently from 2012
- I needed to install python
- It is not syntactically valid python code, at least not for the python 3.11 that I found
So it won't help as it is slightly out of date. It also suggests that the FAQ might benefit from a review.
The BIOS has options for "Legacy", "UEFI", and "Dual" boot modes, so I switched it to "Legacy" for TC. Unfortunately, that didn't help the image installed to the SSD to boot.
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Hi nurbles!
When You boot from DVD or USB drive, what is the name of the SSD on which You want to install TinyCore? Something like /dev/sda. Is it partitioned? For example what is the output of
fdisk -l /dev/sda
?
My guess is that it is already partitioned by Your previous pretenders (Ubuntu, Porteus, etc) and the way they partitioned it is not compatible with TC installer.
Maybe destroying all partitions present will help, but of course it is not for sure and Your SSD may already contain the data important for You.
PS: By the way, Windows was already installed on Your box earlier?
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Hi nurbles
I suggest if you are distro shopping have a look at
https://distrowatch.com/table.php?distribution=slitaz
http://mirror.slitaz.org/iso/rolling/
I have not used it recently, they have moved to a rolling release model which is the model for arch linux/ debian sid etc
In addition you can install a 32 bit distro on 64 bit hardware.
2) if you are still interested in Tinycore, you do not have to use dd or rufus etc to install it.
You can do something similar to what I wrote a long time ago showing here
https://wiki.tinycorelinux.net/doku.php?id=wiki:install_wo_optical_grub2
I did something similar RECENTLY on TC64 using legacy bios with my TC on sda3
If interested I will need to know if your SSD can be connected to another PC--- what OS you have on a working PC.
I can not help if your answer is Windows.....as I have no experience running the linux terminal on Windows
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Oops forgot to mention if you like to try my method, I will need to add a grub install into MBR
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Some years ago i was writtning this thing, maybe this can help with some corrections.
https://forum.tinycorelinux.net/index.php/topic,20135.msg125292.html#msg125292
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jazzbiker: Windows was previously installed, but I removed that SSD drive and replaced it with a brand new SSD drive for TinyCore. As for existing partitions, I've always used the "full disk" (or is it "whole drive"?) option during install. Since booting from USB (or CDROM) tends to leave /dev/sda1 locked in a way I cannot unmount, I've always needed to use a bootable GPartEd in between TinyCore install attempts in order to ensure all partitions are removed.
aus9: Your method looks possible. Can it be run from a TinyCore system booted from USB?
FWIW, the application we need to run on the device could've easily used FreeDOS (with a TCP/IP extension). I'm only mentioning this to show that our system requirements are miniscule. We originally chose TinyCore for the first system we built (over ten years ago) because it was the barest minimum we could find, but we could add a secure shell for remote admin and come command line tools to make the remote management a little easier (like 'mc' and 'nano' which the folks at my company are all familiar with.)
At the moment, my work week is ending. First thing Monday morning, I will start trying these new ideas. Thanks!
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Hi nurbles,
But as I said earlier it was the checkbox "whole disk" to not work properly when I used installer. Using existing partition was successful. Haven't You tried this way? It means that You create partition manually and then run installer.
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Hi
If you look at my install to a specified partition I make no attempt to use an installer. Patrikg method does appear to use installer. If your system allows usb boot up to TC, you can use a busybox version of wget.....that may need ca-certificates, I will test later, or you can use the full wget and not use ca-certicates to download your target image.
it looks like you want to use a fresh SSD for TC so for clean sake, when TC usb stick is in cloud mode, I would suggest we redo gparted to format that drive as fat32 before we put the dirs on it,
move files into the dirs....then create a grub.cfg instead of a 40_custom grub file and in cloud mode,
download grub to install grub into target SSD MBR.
I should with luck be able to give you step by steps this weekend and naturally I will test it.
x86 also known as 32 bit, may be on the way out for most distros but packages build tend to be smaller. Not all upstream coders support it. eg firefox
x86_64 also known as 64 bit. Always larger packages from same source but tends to offer better support upstream.
I do not have the skills of patrikg but have the good looks ;D
EDIT I guess you need x86 for wifi as you have mentioned coreplus?
Is that the reason why you chose x86?
You can use an ethernet cable and choose x86_64 but we just have to download some firmware, some wifi module TCE and maybe some other TCEs
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sheesh correction
I think I will format to ext4 I am making too many mistakes to be trusted. But a journal system provides some power failure protection
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Ok I has to cheat off my debian menu...but usb now boots and is read-writable. I am on tower with a usb wifi dongle that has no wifi module on TC32.
Anyhow I am happy with what I have got even tho I am not as skilled patrikg. I deliberately did not sync with repo to test check for updates.
I have a grub2 menu at boot and I am showing some file permissions, TCEDIR is writeable
https://imgur.com/a/PVPwdKv
I have only gone into the first menu. I realize I have also cheated by doing my unpack commands on TC64 with a tower with 2 internal hard drives
but the boot loader menu for target usb stick....pretend your SSD....does use sda1 formatted as ext4
I then disconnected one drive to simplify my bios boot order.
Here is what it looks like, on TC64 tower with one internal drive booting up and usb stick looks like sdb1 but when I boot up WITH disconnect my internal drive....it gets sda1
tc@box:/mnt/sdb1$ ls
boot/ lost+found/ tce/
tc@box:/mnt/sdb1$ ls boot
core.gz grub/ vmlinuz
ls boot/grub
fonts/ grub.cfg grubenv i386-pc/ locale/ themes/
ls tce
firstrun ondemand/ xbase.lst
installer.instlist optional/ xfbase.lst
kmaps.instlist remaster.instlist xibase.lst
mydata.tgz wifi.instlist xwbar.lst
onboot.lst wififirmware.instlist xwbase.lst
grub.cfg may be too messy to show in same post
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Now where I write /dev/sdb1 you may need to change that.
I assume that when you boot up your currrent read only usb stick...it will be mounted on /mnt/sda1 and so your target SSD likely to be /dev/sdb1 and when mounted /mnt/sdb1 YMMV
I assume you have used sudo gparted to format SSD to ext4. As its so big you will probably want a swap partition but I have kept it simple
Assume you have booted up CorePlus-current.iso which is 14.x x86
Open a terminal and run as root by first command
I would suggest before reboot....insert another usb data stick and copy the iso file onto it.
$ sudo su
# cloud mode TC uses login name of tc... assume you boot the usb stick up to your new computer
# so you have an SSD not yet bootable and the usb booted stick
# download the iso into ram drive under our temporary dir
URL=http://tinycorelinux.net/14.x/x86/release
ISO=CorePlus-14.0.iso
cd /tmp
mkdir unpack
su -c "wget $URL/$ISO \
$URL/$ISO.md5.txt \
tce-load -wi coreutils grub2-multi " tc
cat $ISO.md5.txt
md5sum $ISO
echo 'do you see a duplicate of 6c28310683aa9c6bc862ff4364139d7e CorePlus-14.0.iso ? '
mount -o loop $ISO unpack
echo 'graphical mount tool will appear check what the SSD device, currently red is for /dev/sdX?
mount tool will be open for 10 seconds and then close '
timeout 10 mnttool
# we assume SSD is /dev/sdb1 but I have a tower so I already have a sda
mount /dev/sdb1 /mnt/sdb1
# now we have a partition to write to.
mkdir -p /mnt/sdb1/boot/grub
cd /tmp/unpack
cp boot/core.gz /mnt/sdb1/boot && cp boot/vmlinuz /mnt/sdb1/boot
# ignore 755 permission on /mnt/sdb1/grub files
cd /mnt/sdb1/boot/grub
echo 'insmod part_msdos
insmod ext2
load_video
insmod gzio
insmod all_video
insmod vbe
insmod vga
set GRUB_FONT="/boot/grub/fonts/unicode.pf2"
terminal_input console
terminal_output console
set root=(hd0,msdos1)
set default=0
set timeout=10
set menu_color_normal=cyan/blue
set menu_color_highlight=white/blue
menuentry "JWM" {
set root=(hd0,msdos1)
linux /boot/vmlinuz tce=sda1 waitusb=5 desktop=jwm
initrd /boot/core.gz
}
menuentry FLWM-topside {
set root=(hd0,msdos1)
linux /boot/vmlinuz tce=sda1 waitusb=5 desktop=flwm_topside
initrd /boot/core.gz
}
menuentry "IceWM" {
set root=(hd0,msdos1)
linux /boot/vmlinuz tce=sda1 waitusb=5 desktop=icewm
initrd /boot/core.gz
}
menuentry Fluxbox {
set root=(hd0,msdos1)
linux /boot/vmlinuz tce=sda1 waitusb=5 desktop=fluxbox
initrd /boot/core.gz
}
menuentry Hackedbox {
set root=(hd0,msdos1)
linux /boot/vmlinuz tce=sda1 waitusb=5 desktop=hackedbox
initrd /boot/core.gz
}
menuentry Openbox {
set root=(hd0,msdos1)
linux /boot/vmlinuz tce=sda1 waitusb=5 desktop=openbox
initrd /boot/core.gz
}
menuentry basic {
set root=(hd0,msdos1)
linux /boot/vmlinuz tce=sda1 waitusb=5 desktop=flwm
initrd /boot/core.gz
}
' > grub.cfg
# core vmlinuz are already chmod 444....grub.cfg is 644 which is good enough for me
# now we install grub into mbr of mounted device
echo 'There is small delay in next process abort only if it hangs after 10 seconds'
grub-install --boot-directory=/mnt/sdb1/boot /dev/sdb
# before and after check
# dd if=/dev/sdb bs=512 count=1 | strings
# 1+0 records in
# 1+0 records out
# 512 bytes copied, 0.00116139 s, 441 kB/s
# root@box:/mnt/sdb1/grub# grub-install --boot-directory=/mnt/sdb1/grub /dev/sdb
# Installing for i386-pc platform.
# grub-install: warning: cannot open directory `/usr/local/share/locale': No such file or directory.
# Installation finished. No error reported.
# root@box:/mnt/sdb1/grub# dd if=/dev/sdc bs=512 count=1 | strings
# 1+0 records in
# 1+0 records out
# 512 bytes copied, 0.000192371 s, 2.7 MB/s
# ZRr=
# `|f
# \|f1
# GRUB # my comment.................this is success!
# Geom
# Hard Disk
# Read
# Error
# now we copy cde to tcedir stuff
cd /tmp/unpack
cp -R cde /mnt/sdb1/tce
chmod 755 /mnt/sdb1/tce
chown -R tc:staff /mnt/sdb1/tce
exit 1
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I finally succeeded by using the TinyCore64 image. I have a detailed post about it, but it gets an internal error from the board any time I try to post (or preview) it. Apparently I've typed something "wrongly" or entered too much text, but "internal error" doesn't help me to fix it. Are the forum managers reading this?
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that "internal error" thing has been happening for several years and even predates the web hosting switch-over.
it is best to create your post in a separate editor and when you are satisfied then sign-in and attempt to post it.
from various forum search results it looks like we started having trouble around early February of 2021.
at any rate, keep trying and experimenting and eventually you'll get it to post successfully.
as an alternative you could always post it as an attachment and anyone interested could download it
(however that doesn't help anyone that is only visiting the forum as a guest since only signed-in members can access attachments)