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Tiny Core Linux: a 23 MB Linux distro with graphical desktop
241–250 of 258 posts
Re: Tiny Core Linux: a 23 MB Linux distro with graphical desktop
#242Earlier quoted context omitted.
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). http://qzx.com/pc-gpe/tut2.txt http://qzx.com/pc-gpe/
Sorry I'm not exactly sure what you're saying. I know very well how it works as I write a lot of demos and games (still today) for mode 13h (see https://www.pouet.net/groups.php?which=1217&order=release) and I can program the VGA DAC palette in my sleep. Were you referring to the fact that you write 8-bits to the palette registers? That's true, you do, but only 6-bits is actually used so it effectively wraps around at 64. There are 6-bits per colour component which as you pointed out is 18-bits colour depth.
Btw I was a teenager when those Denthor trainers came out and I read them all, I loved them! They taught me a lot!
Re: Tiny Core Linux: a 23 MB Linux distro with graphical desktop
#243I've used many of these small Linux distros. I used to have Tiny Core in a VM for different things. I also like SliTaz: http://slitaz.org/en , and Slax too: https://www.slax.org/ Oh and puppy Linux, which I could never get into but was good for live CDs: https://puppylinux-woof-ce.github.io/ And there's also Alpine too.
I tried a handful of small distros in order to give new life to an old laptop with an AMD C-50 and 2GB of RAM. The most responsive one, unexpectedly, was Raspberry Pi OS.
Yep. PiOS Desktop (for x86) was a superb very-lightweight distro.
I carefully put a fairly minimal Xfce setup on it instead of LXDE and RAM usage doubled. It's impressively hand crafted and pruned.
Sadly, though, it hasn't been updated since Debian 11.
Re: Tiny Core Linux: a 23 MB Linux distro with graphical desktop
#244Re: Tiny Core Linux: a 23 MB Linux distro with graphical desktop
#245Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not an issue anymore
Really? I seen to remember this being considered "not a bug" by some narrow view of the issue.
Fixed over 2 years ago, as I reported at the time.
Re: Tiny Core Linux: a 23 MB Linux distro with graphical desktop
#246Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
> I have no experience with alternative C libs. Can you share some example issues?
No precompiled Linux stuff runs. No Chrome, no 3rd party Electron apps work unless specifically ported. For me, no Slack, no Panwriter, no Ferdium.
Flatpak works, sort of, with restrictions. Snap doesn't.
Re: Tiny Core Linux: a 23 MB Linux distro with graphical desktop
#247Earlier quoted context omitted.
Alpine also has a lesser known RPi build on their download page; by using musl instead of glibc the difference in size and resources used compared to regular distros is huge as well. https://alpinelinux.org/downloads/
I recently put Alpine with i3 on a Raspberry Pi 4 Model B and I'm super impressed with how snappy it is. I find it much better even than Raspberry Pi OS Lite.
Yep, Alpine works well. A GUI can be tricky, though. And none of the RasPi tools (e.g. `raspi-config`) will run because of the different libc.
So, running it on a Pi 5 CM in an IO board, there's no way to tell the Pi what device to boot from.
Re: Tiny Core Linux: a 23 MB Linux distro with graphical desktop
#248Earlier 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…
> The 8514/A (1987) was Turing complete
WTF? Tell me more!
I have one, but I have no matching screen so I never tried it... Maybe it's worth finding a converter.
Re: Tiny Core Linux: a 23 MB Linux distro with graphical desktop
#249Not 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.
The Acorn Archimedes had the whole OS on a 512KB ROM. That said, OSs came with a lot less stuff then.
> The Acorn Archimedes had the whole OS on a 512KB ROM.
True. And it's still around. It's FOSS now, runs natively on a Raspberry Pi 1-400 and Zero, and has Wifi, IPv6, and a Webkit browser.
Re: Tiny Core Linux: a 23 MB Linux distro with graphical desktop
#250This 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.
> someone took a real shot at reviving the spirit of the project.
They did.
https://www.theregister.com/2024/02/14/damn_small_linux_retu...