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Tiny Core Linux: a 23 MB Linux distro with graphical desktop

tinycorelinux.net

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Re: Tiny Core Linux: a 23 MB Linux distro with graphical desktop

#181

Post by jwrallie »

hamdingers wrote: post #121
dayeye2006 wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

wondering what's your typical usage for those small distros?

In college I used a Slax (version 6 IIRC) SD card for schoolwork. I did my work across various junk laptops, a gaming PC, and lab computers, so it gave me consistency across all of those. Booting a dedicated, tiny OS with no distractions helped me focus. Plus since the home directory was a FAT32 partition, I could access all my files on any machine without having to boot. A feature I used a lot when printing assignme…

Slax is cool, it used to fit a mini cd, so it was easy to carry around and boot and backup files from machines that refused to boot by themselves.

Re: Tiny Core Linux: a 23 MB Linux distro with graphical desktop

#182

Post by throwaway2037 »

dotancohen wrote: post #138
Aurornis wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ive experimented with several small distros for this when doing cross platform development. In my experience, by the time you’re compiling and running code and installing dev dependencies on the remote machine, the size of the base OS isn’t a concern. I gained nothing from using smaller distros but lost a lot of time dealing with little issues and incompatibilities. This won’t win me any hacker points, but now if I n…

To really hammer this home: Alpine uses musl instead of glibc for the C standard library. This has caused me all types of trouble in unexpected places. I'm all for suggestions for a better base OS in small docker containers, mostly to run nginx, php, postgress, mysql, redis, and python.

    > Alpine uses musl instead of glibc for the C standard library. This has caused me all types of trouble in unexpected places.
I have no experience with alternative C libs. Can you share some example issues?

Re: Tiny Core Linux: a 23 MB Linux distro with graphical desktop

#183

Post by bigiain »

trollbridge wrote: post #9

Not to disrespect this, but it used to be entirely normal to have a GUI environment on a machine with 2MB of RAM and a 40MB disk. Or 128K of ram and 400 kb disk for that matter.

Anyone else remember the QNX demo disk from the late '90s? A full unix-like GUI environment that booted from a 1.44MB floppy disk. Ran super responsively in 386 machines with 8MB of RAM.

Re: Tiny Core Linux: a 23 MB Linux distro with graphical desktop

#184

Post by thway15269037 »

oso2k wrote: post #109
theanonymousone wrote: post #67

Does it run docker?

With some modifications, yes. Boot2docker and boot2podman were based on tinycorelinux.

Both are deprecated though. And both say something unexpected on their repositories: one suggests you to use Docker Desktop (what?!), the other to try Fedora (what?!!). Am I taking crazy pills?

Re: Tiny Core Linux: a 23 MB Linux distro with graphical desktop

#185

Post by victorbuilds »

1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote: post #168
hiAndrewQuinn wrote: post #154

Tiny Core Linux has a version for Raspberry Pis called piCore [0] that I wish more people would look at, because it loads itself entirely into RAM and does not touch the SD card at all after that until and unless you explicitly tell it to. Phenomenal for those low powered servers you just want to leave on and running some tiny batch of cronjobs [1] or something for months or years at a time without worrying too much…

"Tiny Core Linux has a version for Raspberry Pis called piCore [0] that I wish more people would look at, because it loads itself entirely into RAM and does not touch the SD card at all after that until and unless you explicitly tell it to." Before RPI existed, I always made filesystem images for USB sticks in NetBSD so that writes never touched "disk" ("diskless"). This allows me to remove the USB stick after boot,…

“It’s been wild to read endless online complaints from so-called ‘technical’ RPi users for the last 13 years about SD card wear and tear…”

A lot of the SD-card wear issues come from people running “normal PC workflows” on a storage medium that was never designed for that pattern.

Something I’ve seen help many newcomers is simply enabling an overlay filesystem or tmpfs-based writes. It’s basically the middle ground between a full RAM-boot distro (piCore, Alpine diskless, NetBSD) and a standard SD-based Raspberry Pi OS.

You still get the normal ecosystem and docs, but almost no writes hit the card unless you explicitly commit them.

For anyone stuck between “I want something simple” and “I don’t want my SD to die,” overlays are the easiest win.

Re: Tiny Core Linux: a 23 MB Linux distro with graphical desktop

#186

Post by marttt »

1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote: post #168
hiAndrewQuinn wrote: post #154

Tiny Core Linux has a version for Raspberry Pis called piCore [0] that I wish more people would look at, because it loads itself entirely into RAM and does not touch the SD card at all after that until and unless you explicitly tell it to. Phenomenal for those low powered servers you just want to leave on and running some tiny batch of cronjobs [1] or something for months or years at a time without worrying too much…

"Tiny Core Linux has a version for Raspberry Pis called piCore [0] that I wish more people would look at, because it loads itself entirely into RAM and does not touch the SD card at all after that until and unless you explicitly tell it to." Before RPI existed, I always made filesystem images for USB sticks in NetBSD so that writes never touched "disk" ("diskless"). This allows me to remove the USB stick after boot,…

What's the size of your "diskless" NetBSD installation, and how fast does it boot?

As compared to TC, the "out of the box" NetBSD images contain many things I wouldn't need, so customizing it has been a recurring thought, but oh well. The documentation and careful modularity is, obviously, a huge bonus of NetBSD in that regard (even an end-user like me could do some interesting modifications of the kernel solely by reading the manual). TC seems much more ad-hoc, but I assume this, too, is intentional, by design.

Re: Tiny Core Linux: a 23 MB Linux distro with graphical desktop

#187

Post by BobbyTables2 »

trollbridge wrote: post #9

Not to disrespect this, but it used to be entirely normal to have a GUI environment on a machine with 2MB of RAM and a 40MB disk. Or 128K of ram and 400 kb disk for that matter.

I agree. That system even had MS word in something like 2-5MB of storage.

Windows 3.1 was only something like 16MB of storage.

Imagine the Cray supercomputer in those days being used to run a toaster or doorbell…

Re: Tiny Core Linux: a 23 MB Linux distro with graphical desktop

#188

Post by BobbyTables2 »

perching_aix wrote: post #175
maccard wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A single 1920x1080 framebuffer (which is a low resolution monitor in 2025 IMO) is 2MB. Add any compositing into the mix for multi window displays and it literally doesn’t fit in memory.

More like 6.2+ MB, or at least I'd sure hope that a FHD resolution is paired with at least a 24 bit (8 bpc) SDR color. And then there's the triple buffered vsync at play, so it's really more like 18.6+ MB.

My video card then didn’t have video ram for 256 color SVGA…

Re: Tiny Core Linux: a 23 MB Linux distro with graphical desktop

#189

Post by tombert »

shiftpgdn wrote: post #3

This is cool. My first into to a practical application of Linux in the early 2000s was using Damn Small Linux to recover files off of cooked Windows Machines. I looked up the project the other day while reminiscing and thought it would be interesting if someone took a real shot at reviving the spirit of the project.

Damn Small Linux was the second Linux I tried (after the free CD promotion that Ubuntu did). I liked it and it was fun to play with, but I was such a newbie that I wasn't able to really use it for anything.

It's 20 years later and I've been running Linux for most of that time, so I probably would have even more fun revisiting DSL and Tiny Core Linux.

Re: Tiny Core Linux: a 23 MB Linux distro with graphical desktop

#190

Post by SoftTalker »

victorbuilds wrote: post #185
1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Tiny Core Linux has a version for Raspberry Pis called piCore [0] that I wish more people would look at, because it loads itself entirely into RAM and does not touch the SD card at all after that until and unless you explicitly tell it to." Before RPI existed, I always made filesystem images for USB sticks in NetBSD so that writes never touched "disk" ("diskless"). This allows me to remove the USB stick after boot,…

“It’s been wild to read endless online complaints from so-called ‘technical’ RPi users for the last 13 years about SD card wear and tear…” A lot of the SD-card wear issues come from people running “normal PC workflows” on a storage medium that was never designed for that pattern. Something I’ve seen help many newcomers is simply enabling an overlay filesystem or tmpfs-based writes. It’s basically the middle ground be…

Tesla rather famously had issues by writing logs to SD storage.
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