Tiny Core Linux
Tiny Core Base => TCB Q&A Forum => Topic started by: lakesnative on February 08, 2024, 10:15:36 PM
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hello, been messing around with tiny core 14.0 for a few days
I really like the entire concept and of all the linux packages I have tried on this ancient laptop, tiny core definitely performs outstanding
tonight I got my sound working and managed (by accident) to get my extensions saved
gonna have questions going forward, but hey I got registered on the forums and was able to play my regular podcasts on youtube tonight! yay!
- lakesnative -
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hi and happy Friday night
currently I have Lubuntu installed on my harddrive with tiny core on a small USB stick
tonight I deleted the files in tce / optional because after trying to get DVD movie playback something was messed up and my sound stopped working for some reason
here are my questions - -
when I originally tried to install tiny core 14.0 on harddrive using the install routine, I kept getting command promt only at boot up (i.e. no GUI). After I formatted the partition to fat32 and using DD to copy from the USB stick to the harddrive partition I booted with the GUI desktop (progress) but then I could not seem to save my extensions so that they were present upon reboot.
Is there a preferred way to partition the harddrive?
If I DD copy the tiny linux OS to a partition on the harddrive, I am thinking that partition has to be fat32, but can I also have another partition on the harddrive that is formatted to ext4?
what I am liking so much about tiny core is how much faster everything runs compared to say Lubuntu
all for now, Lakesnative
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I had problems with Linux file system and driver boot for 10 years!
Since I personally noticed that the changes made do not exceed a few KB, I use TCL, which is read-only and runs on a RAM disk.
Since Linux's own file systems are optimized for machines that do not shut down 24/7, home users cannot experience the comfort of MS file systems. I would say that maybe in the future we can develop a new file system format with artificial intelligence, but there seems to be no need for this when there is read-only.
Long story short, if you boot on USB and use personalized settings as .sh at startup
You can really use TCL without any problems!
By the way, it is very important to invest in RAM.
At least it doesn't become trash like other drivers over time.
It has a lifespan as long as the processor :)
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Is there a preferred way to partition the harddrive?
If I DD copy the tiny linux OS to a partition on the harddrive, I am thinking that partition has to be fat32, but can I also have another partition on the harddrive that is formatted to ext4?
Hi lakesnative!
I may be wrong, but it seems to me, that TCL preferred partition scheme is single partition :-) with /boot and /tce directories. Have You seen http://tinycorelinux.net/book.html?
As far as I know fatXX filesystems lack file permissions, so using them for TCL will certainly have substantial side effects.
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If I DD copy the tiny linux OS to a partition on the harddrive
It is not clear what form of "tiny linux OS" You've used. Here http://forum.tinycorelinux.net/index.php/topic,26658.0.html is an image intended for dd-ing to USB or HDD drive.
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Agreed, sufficient RAM makes things a whole lot easier. =)
I downloaded the 23mb tiny core linux 14.0 so I would have the graphical user interface already present.
I have definitely been reading but mostly in the forums.
Trying to end up with a laptop that someone else can use with little existing knowledge of linux.
- Lakesnative -
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Trying to end up with a laptop that someone else can use with little existing knowledge of linux.
...
TinyCore is probably not a good fit for a loaner/guest/etc machine unless the only usage would be like Kiosk Mode.
(search the forum for "kiosk" and/or chapter 29 of http://tinycorelinux.net/book.html)
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@lakesnative: Welcome to the forum!
There's a trade-off when you ask to have or create Trying to end up with a laptop that someone else can use with little existing knowledge of linux.
In the end, YOU end up being the person who needs to know a little about Linux because the "someone else" you have in mind will be asking you when they don't have an answer to something. As such, you end up needing to know a little about Linux in order to support machines which offers it.
Note to anyone with a different opinion: Both Mac/Apple and Windows have the exact same learning curve for someone with no experience. Nobody is born with Microsoft Certification... it all has to be learned and by someone or by others who have already been through the learning process and "by others" can be first hand or through literature.
The challenge with TinyCore as opposed to some of the more "main-stream distributions" of Linux is that we're aimed more at the person who is trying to build a custom-fit environment for a specific purpose, as @Gadget42 had mentioned, like the Kiosk Mode flavor for a good example. Odds are, this may be exactly what you're after! In fact, if done correctly, it's what most non-computer-programmer types of people really need... something that can be built to specific needs and desires without all of the extra "fluff" that does come with the main-streams.
If you want to be the one who learns some of the basics of how to install an operating system, how to modify that installation with software applications ("extensions" in our case) and most importantly, if you are okay with being the person that takes the heat and/or disappointment if and when something doesn't go exactly as planned, then pull up a chair prepare (as I playfully say to my kids) for your edumacation. There are tons of resources online (and these forums along with our wiki are a plethora of first-hand Tiny Core specific experience) but you must come into the picture with the knowledge that this is your adventure, as is the case with learning anything new, and where my own children (ages 5 and 14) are both very aware, I'm perfectly happy helping someone learn something... but "doing it for people" is what I go to the office for each morning and what pays the bills. (LOL) Now-a-days there seems to be a fine line between student and client.
Instructions on how to get your feet wet:
- Install TinyCore on your laptop "as is"
- When you're at the desktop, press CTRL+ALT+BACKSPACE which should kill the desktop and leave you at the "shell" or "command line"
This is as close to the "heart" of the running operating system as you can get. - Type in tce-ab and press ENTER; this is the shell based extension manager
You're presented with S)earch P)rovides K)eywords or Q)uit - press the letter associated with what you want to do; in this case, press "K" for KEYWORDS.
Keywords is used when you want to search for an extension which you may not know the name of so you're searching by "topics." In this case, enter "browser" and you'll be presented with a list of extensions that have something to do with that word. If you use "S"earch, it's expecting you know the extensions name, or at least a portion of it. "P"rovides is a search function based on actual file names that reside inside an extension. If you're reading through the forum and someone suggests "...install extension SOMETHING..." this is a good way to get moving in that direction.
To return to the desktop, type in startx and press ENTER. The process above is useful for when you add extensions TO your desktop which control HOW it operates as sometimes you need to restart it (as opposed to completely rebooting the machine itself.) The desktop also has an extension or "apps" manager; the goal about teaching you about the shell's version is to give you options for BOTH sides - with a desktop, and without.
READING IS VITAL. While you're experimenting with your extension managers, READ what's in the results! ie: You searched for "browser" -- select one of the results and read the description page that comes with it. This is presented to you before the extension is installed making you the "informed consumer." Don't worry much about installing extensions you don't need -- it's actually VERY easy to start completely over with Tiny Core Linux without having to reinstall it. In fact, a unique feature of Tiny Core is the "always clean" operating system motif... you have to CHOOSE what ingredients you want in your recipe! More importantly, you can REMOVE ingredients without tainting the flavor of what you're making.
Finally, while you are experimenting, you'll have questions... at the top, right of this page is a search box -- use the power of this force wisely and often. When necessary, step back from the forum and use a main-stream search engine which will broaden the search results quite a bit. If you've tried both and still cannot seem to get in the direction of an answer, then start a new topic here and ask away. Be sure to tell us which VERSION of Tiny Core you're using, a little history of the hardware (computer, how much memory it has, etc.) and as much detail as possible of what you're trying to accomplish and what you've already tried to do. We're always willing to help those who help themselves!
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what an awesome post by @CentralWare!
regarding searching within the forum, you will save an incredible amount of time by learning and using the advanced search functions provided by selecting the "Search" link(sandwiched inbetween the "Help" and "Profile" selections). using the "Most recent topics first" search order will give result(s) in a chronological order with older posts about older versions(and perhaps outdated/superceded information) appearing lower in the search results.
regarding webwide searching, recently we have found gxxgle results to be almost worthless compared to https://duckduckgo.com/ and as such have started using them almost exclusively.
just a brief humble fyi
hopefully a little helpful but
as always, your mileage may vary
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@CentralWare & @gadget42
the feedback is appreciated
there is certainly a lot to read (sidenote, I read Linux Torvalds autobiography several years back and found it very enjoyable)
Tiny Linux has a lot of great features and being able to easily keep the system intact is one of them.
My project is an old laptop with a gig of ram and a intel celeron single core processor at like 1.8 gHz, so certainly not powerful.
I could expand the memory to two gigs, but I see that it's usually the processor that's struggling, so I don't think in this case the extra memory would be worth it.
Enjoying this old laptop project and hope to get as much utility out of it as possible.
I have a WinXP machine I still use sometimes at work and even with that system you are limited with what browsers can do current things.
I have a Kmelon browser that doesn't usually have any issues.
Not looking for fixes here necessarily, but some of the things I have run into working with this old laptop running linux is youtube vids load and run, but not always newly uploaded youtube vids. I need to figure out what that is. I get that a live stream vid may be different but sometimes it's a vid that was live like 5 hours ago, but still doesn't want to play even though a vid on that same persons page of uploads from even a day ago plays fine.
I messed around trying to make several partitions to be able to load more than one linux distro, but ran into some issues with some install routines. I think UEFI has something to do with that, but when I tried to make and EFI volume that didn't seem to be an option. Again, not asking for solutions tonight just giving you an idea of what I have been up to. Having fun for sure.
Take good care and thanks again for your replies and information.
- Lakesnative -
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@CentralWare & @gadget42
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My project is an old laptop with a gig of ram and a intel celeron single core processor at like 1.8 gHz, so certainly not powerful.
I could expand the memory to two gigs, but I see that it's usually the processor that's struggling, so I don't think in this case the extra memory would be worth it.
...
increasing the computer's ram to the machine's maximum amount(and speed) can improve performance significantly even on older equipment. also, if possible, upgrading the hard-drive to an ssd should speed up the performance and extend operating time while on battery power.
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@CentralWare thank you for the command line exercise. Printed your instructions off at work and have been trying things out from the command line.
- Lakesnative -
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@lakesnative: Always happy to help!
The next step you MAY want to look into once you have extensions understood is how to take more "control" over your machine's functions which are built into the system.
Type in busybox --help for a long list of functions which are compiled right into your system. Here's an online link (https://busybox.net/downloads/BusyBox.html) to help make a little bit of sense to some of them.
These functions help configure and maintain the computer in one fashion or another similar to the days of DOS. Just familiarize yourself with the names on this list at this point so they're not alien to you if/when you are instructed to use one.
Afterward, return to the desktop and begin setting it up with the APPS program (extension manager) to install a web browser and other vital items you may want.
While you're at it, you'll also want hardware support (for things such as SOUND) - using the extension manager, search for "alsa" which may be a good start for you to get your built in sound system up and running. Be sure to install a MIXER as well as you'll want a Volume Control. If the machine has a card reader built in, you'll possibly want to test and make sure it can read the cards it was intended (as you may need to install support for that as well.)
Best of luck in your new adventure!
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many thanks @CentralWare!
- Lakesnative -
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hello again forum
still enjoying learning Tiny Core 14.0
I have a question about configuring sound properly
have loaded the alsa extensions, which I can see are listed on my onboot.lst, but I have to manually run alsactl init in the terminal upon each reboot or I don't have sound - not at all unhappy that I at least know to do that, but can I add/should I add alsactl init at the end of the alsa extensions in my onboot.lst fle or is there a different way I should be accomplishing this goal?
- Lakesnative -
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Hi lakesnative
See these instructions:
https://forum.tinycorelinux.net/index.php/topic,22145.msg138620.html#msg138620
After that run a backup:
filetool.sh -b
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thank you for the quick reply Rich
- Lakesnative -
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@Rich hope your Sunday is going well
this morning I opened the terminal to use the commands for saving my alsactl init configuration to my system - I have a frugal harddrive install and so far everything is going pretty well. Not using any of the bootup commands such as setting a home location or showing extensions at boot up or anything. All just the regular boot with nothing modified. My TCE folder resides on the same partition as everything else.
I put in the sudo alsactl store command and that had no issue, but when I issued the echo alsactl restore >> /opt/bootlocal.sh I get permission denied even after doing sudo again. I found the bootlocal.sh file and it shows (in the nautilus file browser) a lock on the file. Did I do something incorrectly? bootlocal.sh s located at: /opt
Hope I have given enough info.
- Lakesnative -
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Hi lakesnative
It's not you. Either the owner or permission attributes are wrong.
This should fix it so you can access the file:
sudo chown tc:staff /opt/bootlocal.sh
sudo chmod 775 /opt/bootlocal.sh
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Rich, thanks for the help and the solution.
This made me remember that I have gotten a kind of weird message a few times in my working on getting Tiny Core set up properly that Seamonkey wanted to do some kind of security update or something, but that I didn't have the needed permissions This last time I added the Seamonkey extension to load on boot (which is no different than how I installed the previous times, though I have toggled from trying the newest version in the repository and the one that is just seamonkey.tcz) I so far haven't seen that message, but I was gonna ask at some point about that. Perhaps it's a related issue, dunno.
Once I get my sound running at boot and the extensions I want to load each time (only a few) I will look at those boot options that can be set and see if any would make the system better for this laptop. I want to experiment with some of the extensions loaded on demand as well.
Have a good rest of the weekend!
- Lakesnative -
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Hi lakesnative
... Seamonkey wanted to do some kind of security update or something, but that I didn't have the needed permissions ...
Extensions are saved in a squashfs format. One of the properties of
a squashfs file is that it is read only. That means extensions can not
update themselves.
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ahh, good to know and makes sense
glad I didn't try doing anything "creative", although I did learn in the interim how to take a screenshot!
I suppose this is why loading the current firefox has benefits.
Use Seamonkey still at work on my windows PC since discovering it via Linux many moons ago.
Have to switch to Microsoft Edge for certain websites more than I used to, but still use Seamonkey the majority of the time including for my email (I have archives going back to around 2006).
- Lakesnative -
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still at it here using Tiny Core Linux 14.0
i am at the point where I want to specify my home directory and my swap file
what file do I need to edit to say swap=sda2 and home=sda3 ?
- Lakesnative -
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Hi lakesnative
You need to edit the config file for your boot loader.
Based on your question, it sounds like you installed
Tinycore to sda1. If that's the case and you used
the Tinycore install program, the file should be:
/mnt/sda1/tce/boot/extlinux.confYou want to edit the line that has the word quiet.
In case you haven't seen it, the FAQ page may also
provide some useful information:
http://tinycorelinux.net/faq.html
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hello there Rich!
I edited extlinux.conf to add: nozswap swap=sda2 home=sda3 (after APPEND, which was the line that started with quiet
This created the home directory on my sda3 partition and at bootup I saw the message compressed swap not loaded as specified at boot (or something like that).
Trying to lighten the load on what RAM has loaded into it / has to handle. Is that what I accomplished?
The best news is, I have yet to break my install in spite of all the playing around I have done. After I moved my home directory to sda3, I loaded a bunch of stuff backed up from my old Ubuntu home file - - primarily images and mp4 files I saved using YouTube downloader via firefox browser. Been playing around and having fun playing mp4 files using ffmpeg4 / ffplay.
Did setting my home file to sda3 (as you said, Tiny Core install is on sda1 on my laptop) and creating a swap partition and using that lighten the load on what's in RAM while running Tiny Core or are there better tweaks?
Appreciatively, Lakesnative
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Hi lakesnative
... Trying to lighten the load on what RAM has loaded into it / has to handle. Is that what I accomplished? ...
Yes. If not disabled, zswap take 25% of your free RAM.
... I loaded a bunch of stuff backed up from my old Ubuntu home file - - primarily images and mp4 files I saved using YouTube downloader ...
Assigning home to permanent storage will definitely
save RAM.
Make sure you remove the home entry from:
/opt/.filetool.lstThen run a backup:
filetool.sh -b
Since your home is on permanent storage, there is
no reason to include it in your backup. Otherwise
your backup file (tce/mydata.tgz) will become huge
and your start up and shut down times will become
excessive.
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This is great Rich. Part of the reason I was asking if putting my home file on a separate partition would be advisable is because after doing so it *did* take a very long time to back up. Was worried that somehow RAM was having to handle it, but I could tell after rebooting that it wasn't affecting RAM only the backup. Removing home from the file containing the directories to be backed up solved that and as you told me I ran filetool.sh -b prior to shutdown.
At this point I have also changed a few programs from onboot to ondemand and it's all good!
Cheers!
- Lakesnative -
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Hi lakesnative
... At this point I have also changed a few programs from onboot to ondemand and it's all good!
Depending on the extensions, it may save you some time
booting, but wont really save you much RAM.
Extensions get loop mounted. That takes 300 or 400 bytes
if memory serves. The contents still reside on permanent
storage. The files in the extension get linked to /usr/local/
(bin, lib, etc). A link on average occupies about 40 bytes
give or take. So memory savings are minimal.
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once again, good to know
Have been a puppy linux user (and still am from time to time, using a bootable CD to do this or that...) for many years. When I first started playing around with puppy linux one of the things I always wanted to do was get rid of everything I really didn't use and only have the things I do use. So, as you can imagine I have been having a lot of fun setting up Tiny Core with the few apps I know I want. At @CentralWare input I have watched more than one YouTube vid describing what busybox can do. Good times. =)
Enjoy the rest of the weekend minus that one hour of "daylight savings" @Rich
- Lakesnative -
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3-13-2024 @Rich, @CentralWare
Hello. Tried several times to send you both a PM.
Maybe I don't have permissions, not sure I tried from two different webrowsers.
Please let me know what the protocol is when you have a moment.
Nothing at all urgent.
- Lakesnative -
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Hi lakesnative
I checked your account and it indicates you do
have permission to send PMs.
I see no reason for this.
Do you have an ad blocker or similar plugin?
Are you blocking cookies?
Maybe if you describe what's happening on the screen
as you try to send a message, someone can diagnose
the issue.
All you've said is it doesn't work for you. Details matter:
Any error messages?
Does the mouse pointer change shape when it passes
over the Send message button?
If you click the Preview button, does a preview of your
message show up at the top of your page?
If you want to send a PM to multiple members:
Enter a name in the To: field.
Press the enter key.
Enter another name in the To: field.
Press the enter key.
Or:
Enter a comma separated list in the To: field.
Press the enter key.
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Hi Rich.
I will try again. Like I said I tried using two different web browsers.
It failed on both preview and post previously.
Seems like a pretty straightforward process, but I will admit I don't usually send PM's online period.
Will let you know what error I get.
- Lakesnative -
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Rich, Error message just says: The server encountered an internal error or misconfiguration and was unable to complete your request. More information about this error may be available in the server error log.
It's not a huge deal, but I thank you for responding.
All I wanted to do was send you and CentralWare the little sample clip I made since I couldn't have made it without your help.
=)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AThJfcWuIPg (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AThJfcWuIPg)
- Lakesnative -
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Hi lakesnative
Error message just says: The server encountered an internal error ...
That error has been with us for the last 3 years, but it's gotten a lot
better since CentralWare migrated the forum to a new server.
It's triggered by punctuation and words that are deemed malicious
in certain contexts. To keep things interesting, phrases that trigger
the error one day are accepted without incident another, and vice
versa.
If you want to know more, go to the search page:
https://forum.tinycorelinux.net/index.php
and enter this in the Search for: field including the quotes:
"The server encountered an internal error"You'll get about 20 results.