OK but I need a Linux with GUI that is less than 1.44MB so it works with my floppy disk.
Tiny Core Linux: a 23 MB Linux distro with graphical desktop
211–220 of 258 posts
Re: Tiny Core Linux: a 23 MB Linux distro with graphical desktop
#212Earlier quoted context omitted.
Same situation but I'm using NetBSD instead. I'm betting it'll still be supporting 32-bit x86 long after the linux kernel drops it.
Personally, I think that dropping 32 bit support for Linux is a mistake. There is a vast number of people in developing countries on 32 bit platforms as well as many low cost embedded platforms and this move feels more than a little insensitive.
won't there still be the older kernels?
Re: Tiny Core Linux: a 23 MB Linux distro with graphical desktop
#213Earlier 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.
It's so much fun working with systems with more pixels than ram though. Manually interleaving interrupts. What joy.
If you use a tile-based hardware renderer, such as on the original nintendo chip, then pixels are rendered on the fly to the screen by the hardware automatically pulling pixels based on the tile map.
Re: Tiny Core Linux: a 23 MB Linux distro with graphical desktop
#214Earlier quoted context omitted.
Computers didn't used to have GPUs back then when 150kB was a significant amount of graphics memory.
The IBM PGC (1984) was a discrete GPU with 320kB of RAM and slightly over 64kB of ROM. The EGA (1984) and VGA (1987) could conceivably be considered a GPU although not turning complete. EGA had 64, 128, 192, or 256K and VGA 256K. The 8514/A (1987) was Turing complete although it had 512kB. The Image Adapter/A (1989) was far more powerful, pretty much the first modern GPU as we know them and came with 1MB expandable t…
A video card is not a GPU.
Re: Tiny Core Linux: a 23 MB Linux distro with graphical desktop
#215Re: Tiny Core Linux: a 23 MB Linux distro with graphical desktop
#216For unknown reasons, tinycorelinux's website is geoblocked in Japan.
I seem to be able to access it just fine via ProtonVPN's Japan region tho.
Re: Tiny Core Linux: a 23 MB Linux distro with graphical desktop
#217Not 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.
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.
You do not really need a framebuffer to drive a GUI, though. That's very much a PC thing.
Re: Tiny Core Linux: a 23 MB Linux distro with graphical desktop
#218Tiny 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,…
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Re: Tiny Core Linux: a 23 MB Linux distro with graphical desktop
#219Earlier quoted context omitted.
"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 about wear on the SD card itself rendering the whole installation moot." Yes, this is exactly what I want, except I need some simple node servers running, which is not so ultra light. Would you happen to know, if this still all works withi…
To my understanding TCL expects the RAM-only / diskless case unless you put in a lot of extra work not to do that. In your situation the only thing you would have to really be worried about is whether 4 GB of RAM or whatever you have is enough to fit TCL and the files for your node server and the actual programs you are trying to run with all that. It doesn't get pretty once you exceed your available RAM, be forewarn…
Not true. You can enable “Mount Mode of Operation: TCE/Install” where packages will be mounted off disk. See:
Re: Tiny Core Linux: a 23 MB Linux distro with graphical desktop
#220Earlier quoted context omitted.
You might be thinking of DOS mode 13h, which was VGA 320x200, 8 bits per pixel.
And 6-bits per colour component.
VGA color palette was 18-bits/256K, but input into the palette was 8-bit per channel. (63,63,63) is visibly different from (255,255,255).