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Tinycore Linux
- rsend1 6y agoI reduced the kernel size (stripped out unnecessary drivers) and stuffed a stripped-down version with full GUI into my BIOS / ROM chip running coreboot. Pretty neat.
- known 6y ago"make tinyconfig" while building kernel https://01.org/linuxgraphics/gfx-docs/drm/admin-guide/README.html https://01.org/linuxgraphics/gfx-docs/drm/admin-guide/README...
- musicale 6y agoI just tried it for fun: (5.9.10/x86 built in VM on laptop) 423kB bzImage, 85s build time
- efiecho 6y agoIn this day and age I always verify the authenticity of downloaded ISO images, but this seems not possible with Tinycore Linux as no signatures are available, which makes me somewhat uncomfortable.
- yellowapple 6y agoI like to use Tiny Core as the rescue environment on my machines, since it fits perfectly in boot partitions. The small size also makes it great for thin clients.
- boogies 6y agoI use a similar distro, Puppy, because it has the ability to copy its squashed file system (SFS) files to RAM and then continue running with the persistent storage medium detached. It has certain peculiarities like defaulting to logging in and running everything other than web browsers as root, so I’d like to switch to Tinycore if it’s different in that respect. My main concern is package availability — Puppy is compatible with the repos of major distros like Ubuntu.
- 0x445442 6y agoPuppy is very interesting in that at first glance the distro comes of as sort of a toy distro. But then when you look closer at the files system and the security ramifications related to that, it's a very serious distro.
- xav0989 6y agoUbuntu (a quite a few other distros) can be made to run entirely from RAM (that's how the LiveCDs actually work). It's probably not as easy to configure are Puppy or Tinycore, but it's possible.
- Naac 6y agoThat's different than what the GP said. I'm pretty sure you can't boot into an Ubuntu live disk, detach the usb, and keep using the system without any errors or loss of functionality.
- boogies 6y agoThat was what I thought too, thanks to abdullahkhalids for linking to the askubuntu thread that shows — with the right boot flag — you actually can https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25172520 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25172520
- vonwoodson 6y agoThat page looks like it hasn’t been updated since 2008 and the wiki is down. :/
- boogies 6y agoRepoBrowser too. Edit: but the forum has recent posts (some from today): http://forum.tinycorelinux.net/ http://forum.tinycorelinux.net/
- ngcc_hk 6y agoI saw that as well. May be the admin just had not updated the home page for decades.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- boygobbo 6y agoThe forums are live: http://forum.tinycorelinux.net/ http://forum.tinycorelinux.net/
- jmt_ 6y agoLooks like the images were updated on April 1st of this year: http://tinycorelinux.net/11.x/x86/release/ http://tinycorelinux.net/11.x/x86/release/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiny_Core_Linux#Release_history https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiny_Core_Linux#Release_histor... The 2008 date is likely when the page was initially authored rather than last updated
- larrydag 6y agoI used this distro to boot up an old 486 machine that I had lying around. It worked. Just did it to try it out.
- alexellisuk 6y agoCan it support 64-bit ARM? Perhaps it will run faster than Ubuntu 20.10 on my RPi 400
- jug 6y agoI think that would be this one: http://tinycorelinux.net/12.x/aarch64/releases/RPi/ http://tinycorelinux.net/12.x/aarch64/releases/RPi/ Note how there are ports on this page but it doesn't seem to be updated well. The Raspberry Pi links lead to ARMv6 ("piCore") ports and not AArch64 ("piCore64") ports: http://tinycorelinux.net/ports.html http://tinycorelinux.net/ports.html I found the first link from their Raspberry Pi forum: http://forum.tinycorelinux.net/index.php/topic,24384.0.html http://forum.tinycorelinux.net/index.php/topic,24384.0.html
- StreamBright 6y agoHave you tried Alpine? It has a Rpi version.
- UncleSlacky 6y agoVoid is another possibility: https://voidlinux.org/download/#download-ready-to-boot-images-for-arm https://voidlinux.org/download/#download-ready-to-boot-image...
- pards 6y agoThere's a small typo on the main page: >> CorePlus ofers a simple way...
- jlgaddis 6y agoMaybe report it to the TinyCore Linux team then? There's absolutely nothing HN can do about it.
- dcassett 6y agoIt's interesting, though, that when a website hits the front page of HN it often gets the attention of the owners.
- thotsBgone 6y agoDropping the 'f' is actually a way of reducing the filesize of the website, which is very important for the Tinycore project.
- robertlagrant 6y agoExactly. It's too compact to have a complete offering.
- zoomablemind 6y agoVery interesting concept, system reassembles itself on every boot like from lego blocks. Each installed application package is mounted and connected to the core image. This way the system is refreshed to the defined state on each boot. I wanted to set up a minimalistic pocket environment on a USB flash stick, but eventually stumbled on the need to re-package some of additional applications. For example, I needed to add Maxima, yet it was not in their prepackaged repo. Trying to recompile it manually threw some dependency-related errors, well, familiar story... But the idea is still great, it works well on older boxes. Will probably revisit it at some point.
- slim 6y agotry d-core. based on tinycore and debian.
- bArray 6y agoI quite like using this distro for simplistic VMs as they have a small footprint and are very fast. An example may be to have some people in a workshop compile and run some code, or perform some networking tasks. As some here will know, having 10+ Ubuntu VMs really starts to eat some disk space!
- 1MachineElf 6y agoSome organizations using BigFix endpoint manager have TinyCore Linux VMware images that are pre-configured to act as a "relay" for their deployment. https://help.hcltechsw.com/bigfix/9.5/platform/Platform/Installation/c_tiny_core_introduction.html https://help.hcltechsw.com/bigfix/9.5/platform/Platform/Inst...
- musicale 6y agoBigFix definitely seems malware-like.
- skyde 6y agoit sad that the minimum to boot linux is now 11MB. I recall booting a full QNX desktop demo from a 1.44mb floppy :-( Why is the kernel so fat ?
- musicale 6y agoA full Oberon system image is about 1MB, including GUI, utilities, and the compiler, though a 100KB image can boot and run a text editor. https://schierlm.github.io/OberonEmulator/ https://schierlm.github.io/OberonEmulator/ The original Oberon system was something like 12,000 lines of code, something you could imagine reading in its entirety. IIRC most of the Linux kernel source code is device drivers; the linux kernel also has a huge amount of functionality, much more than you need just to boot a PC into a GUI. Much of Linux user code is bloated libraries with a good deal of duplicated functionality. Many GUI-based systems from the 1980s and 1990s were very compact by modern standards. (Even a full Smalltalk-80 system image is less than 2MB including the source code.) You can still run RISC OS on the Raspberry Pi to try out a 1980s/90s-style PC OS. Classic text-based UNIX OSes were obviously also dramatically smaller than modern Linux distributions. Regarding device drivers, I wonder if the BIOS approach is better - assume the hardware vendor supplies the device drivers, and let the OS use those drivers rather than supplying its own. Someone will probably argue that "oh legacy BIOS is 16-bit, doesn't support [caching/acceleration/scatter-gather/async/polling/ feature x] or hardware vendors don't know how to write drivers or it's closed source or blah blah blah" but that would be missing the point that the idea of separating the driver subsystem from the OS might not be such a bad one.
- neurostimulant 6y agoYou should be able to reduce the size by compiling the kernel yourself and disable features you don't need. Not sure how far you can shrink it down though, probably not enough to fit in a floppy anymore.
- skyde 6y agothanks it’s good to know the fat can be opted out at compile time. I am very curious what a modern kernel contain that an old linux kernel did not that would make it more than 30 times bigger
- locusofself 6y agoThis brings me back to a job I had 10-12 years ago, where I would make custom PXE or flash-booted linux "distros" based on the debian-live/casper project, for companies that needed kiosks with custom branding, that would wipe on each boot, etc. It was pretty fun and taught me loads about a linux and how it works.
- eugenekolo 6y agoIts a nifty Linux that I used for my "fake NAS" running on an old thin client. The docs are fairly simple, and their package manager has mostly everything you need. It's easy to set up a weekly cron job and samba server on it for some NTFS drives.
- Abishek_Muthian 6y agoI wanted a Linux distro with small memory footprint (1GB) for a VM, since Tincore Linux obviously fits the requirement I went for it only to find out that package installations require a bit of learning curve and that not all common Linux softwares were available. I couldn't put time into learning Tinycore's quirks or building packages from scratch due to low VM specifications and so I went for Lubuntu. Lubuntu now comes with LXQt and is surprisingly robust. Default applications on Lubuntu are all Qt apps, fast and memory efficient. Falkon Web Browser is great unless the websites use some weird JS and since there are several websites which do weird JS stuff I had to install Firefox too and with it increase memory by another 1GB to prevent hang ups(which still happen with Firefox occasionally).
- sevensor 6y agoI had a great time running Tiny Core on a ThinkPad R31 about 10 years ago. I eventually put Arch on it because Arch is so easy to use, but I miss how snappy Tiny Core was and I think I may try it again.
- thomastjeffery 6y agoBack when I was in high school (~2009), the computers in our "computer lab" would take a solid 10min to boot Windows XP. I ended up bringing a flash drive with Tinycore and a floppy with Das U-Boot (the BIOS didn't have a USB boot option). I was able to get a snappy Linux system with Chromium running, all from a ramdisk, while everyone else spent most of their time waiting around for Windows XP on slow platter drives. It was great.
- Teknoman117 6y agoHah, I got detention for a week for doing something fairly similar (booting Linux off external media). School's position was that if they couldn't spy on your computer usage you must be doing something bad.
- yellowapple 6y agoYeah, I got in trouble in my high school's computer class for booting Ubuntu 8.04 off a live CD. Probably would've gotten away with it had the machine's built-in (and therefore impossible-to-mute) speakers didn't blast the startup sound: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CQaEXZ-df6Y https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CQaEXZ-df6Y Thankfully I got off with a stern warning and a "whatever you did, I can't see your screen any more, so you better fix it".
- novaleaf 6y agowere you?
- Teknoman117 6y agoNah. These were new Core 2 Duo machines running so much enterprise spyware / anti-virus software that if rendered them nearly unusable. MS Office was extremely slow, IE 7 took 30 to 40 seconds to load pages. OpenOffice and Firefox on a Ubuntu 10.04 LiveUSB ran laps around the stock software. The positive outcome was that I was allowed to bring my own laptop to school after that. They even gave me an account on the guest wifi.
- 6y ago
- mleonhard 6y agoDoes anything like this exist?: - A program to build a bootable Linux image from a config file, like NixOS - The image is tiny, like Alpine Linux - Support for x86, Raspberry Pi, DigitalOcean, and EC2 There is a project to build bootable NixOOS images for Raspberry Pi [1], but it produces 2GB+ images. The iteration time to build + copy + boot is about 10 minutes. And the images are too large to easily distribute. Packer [2] has some of these things, but it has to run on an actual EC2/DigitalOcean VM to produce images for them. That's a lot of extra config, potential for cost overruns from failed VM shutdowns, more secrets to manage, and more ACLs to maintain. [1] https://github.com/Robertof/nixos-docker-sd-image-builder https://github.com/Robertof/nixos-docker-sd-image-builder [2] https://www.packer.io https://www.packer.io
- ChiefOBrien 6y agoYou shold try out buildroot[1]. It's used for building a complete linux image for embedded systems so the result is quite small, efficient. There are several guides online on how to build for Raspberry Pi, might support cloud as well. [1] https://buildroot.org/ https://buildroot.org/
- mleonhard 6y agoThanks. Buildroot looks useful. The docs say to use a graphical program to configure it. The program edits a .config file which presumably could be code reviewed and checked into source control. Do you know of any open source projects that check in their buildroot .config file? Reviewing a generated config file has downsides. The file does not show the context associated with changes. Comments are either unsupported or easily destroyed by the editor. The file format may be confusing or may destroy blame info by putting many options on one line. The file format and how to use the graphical tool are extra chunks of knowledge that engineers must load and maintain. Buildroot is designed for folks making custom kernels. I don't need that. I want everything related to the hardware to just work. This includes automatically mounting attached network block devices on DigitalOcean & EC2 and configuring wifi on Raspberry Pi.
- pvtmert 6y agoSLAX has similar goals with little bit bigger base... Fun facts: - SLAX was Slackware based, but it switched to Debian base (apt) - The first 'linux-live-kit' was from Slax's author. - It used layered filesystem (overlayfs) long before Docker & containers were a thing. - It had 'persistence' while running off the usb, via 'file' or partition. (Then Ubuntu did similar thing with casper-rw <- term for squashfs+overlay persistence in ubuntu) Link: http://slax.org http://slax.org
- somesortofsystm 6y agocough Yggdrasil cough
- beagle3 6y agoIirc knoppix preceded slax by a couple of years.2005 or so.
- mdtusz 6y agoTinycore was used at my last job to get around some frustrations of updating the embedded systems on the machines we made (which ran a full blown Linux system). We mailed customers USB drives that when plugged in would mount and start tinycore Linux, then write the new system to a parallel partition, reboot the machine, then run a few health checks. Some might say it's hacky (it is/was) but it worked pretty well and allowed for recovery of totally borked systems.
- xwdv 6y ago> We mailed customers USB drives- This would be a non starter for any security conscious client.
- mdtusz 6y agoAgreed that it's not a good practice security wise. This is what I argued against when the initial request was made (we also had over the air upsates) but it was interestingly the _most_ "security conscious" customers that had requested this - they specifically wanted us to mail them either replacement microSD cards (the disks on the machines) or USB sticks. The machines themselves verified the contents and we also offered a way for customers to download the images directly and verify, but most customers just opted for snail mail. /shrug. Several of these companies also had strict email attachment filters that we were instructed to get around by just appending `.allow` to the filenames. There was tons of this type of stuff that we encounted which really highlighted that corporate security at many companies is just theatre.
- plasticchris 6y agoDepends. If the image is signed/ encrypted it would be fine.
- minitech 6y agoUntil it switches to emulating a USB keyboard after you boot :)
- SahAssar 6y ago