Tiny Core Linux

http://www.tinycorelinux.net/welcome.html

by chirau • 8 years ago

198 98 8 years ago

tinycorelinux.net

splitbrain• 8 years ago

I remember a time when stuff like this fit on a single 3.5 floppy.

exikyut4• 8 years ago

Xwoaf is still floating around out there. It was almost unusably minimal, though.

thathappened• 8 years ago

Openwrt's pretty tiny imo

lgierth• 8 years ago

I've regularly fit OpenWrt into 3 MiB, including an HTTP server and web UI.

c12• 8 years ago

I sometimes like to boot up my old 386 into MS-DOS from a 3.5" floppy... I haven't done much research into it but I used to have a disk with linux on it that would boot fine.

Can't seem to find anything today that would fit on one, but then again I haven't done much more than a cursory dig.

EvanAnderson• 8 years ago

The Linux Router Project (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_Router_Project) did that kind of thing in the late 90's and early 2000's. It's long-since dead, however. I doubt there's much of anything today, given the size of the kernel alone.

I built a Linux floppy-based bootable disk imaging environment to roll out masses of Windows 95/98 machines back in 1997-1999. You'd compile a minimal kernel down to 600 - 800 KB then pack-up your userland in an itty-bitty gzipped filesystem archive and concatenate it with the kernel at an even sector boundary, dd the whole thing to a disk, and set some bits to tell the kernel where to load the initrd. I've never gone back to see how much of that functionality still exits in modern kernels. (Very little, I'd assume...)

pjmlp• 8 years ago

I used to have one 1.44MB with MS-DOS 3.3 trimmed to the minimum and Turbo Pascal.

kokey• 8 years ago

FreeBSD, where that one floppy was enough to set up a modem and dial up to establish a PPP session and then download the rest of the installation. All while allowing you to open another terminal to telnet to a shell somewhere else and pass the time with e-mail and irc while FreeBSD downloads and installs.

ksec• 8 years ago

Is there a Tiny Core Version for FreeBSD?

justherefortart• 8 years ago

I remember 2 floppies. Never 1 for Linux+XWindows.

Trinux was pretty slick back in the day.

Zardoz84• 8 years ago

muLinux can boot from a single floppy without X11. With X11 need 2 or 3 disks.

pokstad• 8 years ago

I remember when TCL was a scripting language.

rkeene2• 8 years ago

It still is, there are hundreds of contributors and a new release (Tcl v8.6.8) came out 22-DEC-2017. There are plans for a new major release, Tcl 9, as well.

Tcl still has many unique features that other languages lack. One new highly experimental feature is TclQuadCode, which can compile Tcl to machine code using LLVM. It's been in progress for over 5 years and it is amazing work. Compiling a dynamic language is a difficult task.

PeCaN2• 8 years ago

Remember the QNX 4.25 demo disk that fit on a single 3.5 floppy and included a GUI, networking, a web browser (with basic javascript), clustering, and various other applications?

What a great little OS.

vram223• 8 years ago

I had tried it out too. It was really fast, a lot more than the Linuxes I was using then - Red Hat and Mandrake. (Not comparable, I know.) I think they had a UI / desktop environment called Photon.

insulanian• 8 years ago

Still have it somewhere!

FreakyT• 8 years ago

That's exactly what I thought of when I saw this post.

Still astounding they managed to fit so much into 1.44mb!

rootbear2• 8 years ago

I really wish that there was still a free version of QNX around. I enjoyed playing with it.

dguaraglia• 8 years ago

Yes! That was amazing, specially compared with the basic KDE/Gnome Linux distro at the time that would take a whooping 100mb. Now I install OS X apps that are > 150mb on a regular basis. It's ridiculous.

michrassena3• 8 years ago

I remember my excitement using the QNX boot floppy. It was a full OS with a GUI, all from one 1.44MB disk. It had no PPP support, but fortunately it worked with Ethernet.

michrassena3• 8 years ago

But back on the subject of the post, I'm happy to see this project. I went searching a small Linux distribution a few months ago, and most of the projects I'd relied on the in the past seemed to have stopped development, like DSL, or Puppy.

robin_reala• 8 years ago

It would still fit on an LS-120 3.5″ floppy, although I suspect they’re even harder to get hold of these days.

beagle32• 8 years ago

It still does.

http://kparc.com - OS, GUI, database, boots on 64-but bare metal, still fit on a 3.5in floppy last time I looked.

krylon• 8 years ago

These days, finding a machine with a floppy drive, let alone an actual floppy disk, might be harder than shrinking a system down enough to fit on a floppy disk.

EDIT: Don't get me wrong, it is really cool people can build such tiny systems. But the smallest storage device in my household it a 2GB SD card. Outside of embedded devices and low-end routers, I do not see the point other than for hack value.

hucker• 8 years ago

Are there any bootable releases anywhere?

metalliqaz• 8 years ago

Such a simple website and yet still crushed by the hackernews rush.

IronWolve• 8 years ago

I once created a windows floppy with winsock ini settings, irc, netscape, eudora and an ntp client, all pre-configured for an ISP I was working at. Users just had to put in their username and password, oh dialup isp days...

The other floppy OS I tinkered around with was QNX, but it was just a demo of what QNX could do.

anoother• 8 years ago

Yup.

I remember Blender boasting for years about how it fit on a floppy.

carapace• 8 years ago

Has no one mentioned Tom's Root Boot yet? :-)

tomsrtbt (pronounced: Tom's Root Boot) is a very small Linux distribution. It is short for "Tom's floppy which has a root filesystem and is also bootable."[1] Its author, Tom Oehser, touts it as "The most GNU/Linux on one floppy disk", containing many common Linux command-line tools useful for system recovery (Linux and other operating systems.) It also features drivers for many types of hardware, and network connectivity.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tomsrtbt

Also, Oberon fits on a 1.44M floppy. http://www.projectoberon.com/

sprash• 8 years ago

An actual Linux distribution that fits on a floppy is still available here: http://asm.sourceforge.net/asmutils.html

sevensor2• 8 years ago

I recommend searching their forum if you're actually trying to use Tiny Core. It fills in a lot of gaps in their docs.

steeve• 8 years ago

TCL is really nice. boot2docker was based on it before they switched to Docker for Mac & Alpine.

justincormack• 8 years ago

We switched to LinuxKit https://github.com/linuxkit/linuxkit - it was very hard to maintain boot2docker and TCL and make them usable. LinuxKit is generally a little larger, as we use a bunch of Go code rather than C and Go is a little bloated, although that will improve no doubt. You can make very small LinuxKit images if you really want too.

iod• 8 years ago

I knew of TinyCore but I hadn't heard of dCore, which apprently has Debian/Ubuntu package support. According to http://wiki.tinycorelinux.net/dcore:welcome

"minimal live Linux system based on Micro Core (Tiny Core Linux) that uses scripts to download select packages directly from vast Debian or Ubuntu repositories and convert them into useable SCEs (self-contained extensions). "

michrassena3• 8 years ago

In spite of needing something like this a few weeks ago, I wonder what the role of such reduced distributions actually are these days. Storage is ridiculously cheap. A 64MB compact flash card doesn't cost significantly less than a 2GB card (32x the storage).

I have a few old PCs sitting around, a Pentium 4D, a core duo or two. These are full-size PCs, old Dells and IBMs. It doesn't make much of a difference if they are running an 11MB distribution or a full Debian with GUI.

What I'd really like is a small form factor PC with full x86 support so that I can run DOS, or other PC oses, like the BSDs or BEOS. Ideally it would be the size of a Raspberry PI and cost the same. I know such systems are available, but the cost is an issue. Emulation just isn't the same either.

jandrese2• 8 years ago

One thing that drives me nuts is how these embedded systems always want to use goddamn BusyBox instead of full fat Bash and userland. There's just enough stuff removed from BusyBox to break scripts and generally make life annoying. And for what, to save 20MB of space on your 16GB device?

saagarjha2• 8 years ago

Not every embedded device has the luxury of 16 GB of storage.

markbnj• 8 years ago

We use alpine as a base for production containers because it makes pulling the image a lot faster. A typical image might be 10-20MB vs. 60-100+MB if based on ubuntu.

smhenderson• 8 years ago

In spite of needing something like this a few weeks ago, I wonder what the role of such reduced distributions actually are these days.

In my mind the primary value is learning. The smaller the system the more likely I can understand how all the parts interact. Once a basic understanding is achieved you can start layering in more and still keep up.

Once you get a bit past that it's easy to create recovery media and other interesting boot tools.

I'm sure others can think of more but that's the first thing that I think of when I think of LFS, Tiny and to a lesser extent distros like Slackware that still tend to keep things relatively simple.

zxexz• 8 years ago

In spite of needing something like this a few weeks ago, I wonder what the role of such reduced distributions actually are these days.

I think this is pretty much why. If you were to take your average hacker/maker, most of them would probably have a similar sentiment. However, most of them would also have a story about how they needed some tiny distro like TCL recently for some niche use case.

I myself needed a tiny distro recently. I had 22 rackmount servers with no HDD all on the same network, and I needed them to all run the same static binary. I realized like most Intel servers, with default settings, they will try to boot over the network with PXE. Wanting to not spend a day messing around with provisioning these servers, I decided I would just put a linux image on a USB stick, stick it in my OpenWRT router, and host it over TFTP. Serving a large image from a USB stick every time each of 22 servers started up was an unnecessary use of bandwidth and would often fail (I didn't have the best router). I also didn't need anything except a network stack and the ability to run a 64 bit static binary, so I did some research and ended up using the x86_64 version of TCL. Worked great! I'm sure tons of others have weird niche use cases for such a distro.

Of course, as my needs evolved, I ended up just using a minimal Arch linux image...

vram223• 8 years ago

Finnix was another good small Linux I had tried out some time earlier. Again, it is more for booting up and then maybe for doing some maintenance work than for regular use.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finnix

https://www.finnix.org/

snowpanda• 8 years ago

This is so cool, what are some great uses for this?

hartzell• 8 years ago

[piCorePlayer](https://sites.google.com/site/picoreplayer/home)!!!

marttt• 8 years ago

I use it to produce 50-minute radio shows for my country's public broadcasting. I work with a Thinkpad T42 from circa 2004. Swapped the PATA HDD for a Compact Flash card -- prior to this, everything was just surprisingly snappy thanks to Tiny Core Linux's RAM boot; now the machine is also wonderfully quiet.

Granted, this is pushing it, but I've been using this setup every day for almost two years. (I just like to use old hardware until it dies -- or, is this what old IPS-screened Thinkpads generally turn people into?)

Sure, you probably should be a "computational minimalist" by nature (e.g. there is an older version of Chromium, but I suppose your main browser will be Dillo -- which, actually, is just wonderful once you get used to it). But if you are a minimalist, I'd say it's a really solid system.

Also, it's fun for me to think that I bought this Thinkpad T42 three years ago for €20. And now I use it as my main workhorse in a field where typical setups consist of new-ish MacBooks with high-end SSDs and an up to date version of Pro Tools. (And where people occasionally still think that "duh, you can probably only edit a text file in Linux".)

So it's an awesome, clean, fairly easy to maintain distro (e.g. in case of a typical install you have a pristine system after every reboot). And the community is very friendly and responsive.

exikyut4• 8 years ago

I'm also using a T43, circa 2006.

Nowadays I've found myself mostly using it for VNC to a slightly better machine (my old desktop, on permanent loan to a family member after their laptop broke. This works...). And... even on my not-great 802.11g, and the CPU even locked to 800MHz, typing this text over TigerVNC is literally realtime with no perceptible lag or delay. I'm honestly amazed. But anyway...

FWIW, launchpad.net have multiple sources providing the latest 32-bit builds of Chromium. These are built for Ubuntu, but I find they've worked 100% fine on Slackware. :P (After some work I even got the debugging symbols into the right place!)

(Nothing stopping you from building the world's largest LD_PRELOAD to pull in "enough Ubuntu" that Chromium boots, but I find that 100% unnecessary at this point.)

Some build daily(ish), some build fortnightly-to-monthly-ish. Before I set up VNC, I was in the process of figuring out an autoupdate script (CLI PHP, easily rewritten) that would find and fetch the packages off Launchpad. Let me know if you'd like a copy, I never finished it but I did do the Herculean bit of figuring out the magic API URLs, the rest is just boring scripting and downloading.

Protip. If you open 100-170 tabs (possible! on 2GB! with The Great Suspender), the main process will hit 4G VIRT. xD

Besides that, NetSurf is a bit better than Dillo, you're probably already aware of it.

ComputerGuru• 8 years ago

SliTaz was another great distribution, very feature complete and highly polished for its incredibly small size. Unfortunately - and you could see this coming a mile away - like so many other projects (open source or otherwise) they decided they’d “do a rewrite” and the project really lost its way and fizzled our thereafter.

interfixus• 8 years ago

It was indeed. Saved my butt any number of times before it zombied out in the transition.

When I workded in public IT, on a few occasions I booted Slitaz on troubled machines that idiot colleagues had battled with for hours or days, trying to install som Windows. In less than a minute, I had a working, webbrowsing desktop running entirely from RAM. Tellingly, nobody ever as much as asked a simple how? - somehow reminding me of the Australian aborigines simply ignoring the arrival of a UFO in the shape of captain Cook's ship.

kup0• 8 years ago

I notice there are apparently still rolling releases coming out for it?

I've run the latest ones and for a quick and dirty live desktop from a super small image, it still seems to be a good option.

I tried looking around for what happened to SliTaz, is there an article/detail anywhere on that (the transition/rewrite/zombification)?

skrowl• 8 years ago

I'd love to see this type of distribution on Windows Subsystem for Linux. The default Ubuntu is over 500MB!

thomastjeffery2• 8 years ago

There is some work for Archlinux and NixOS on WSL.

limeblack2• 8 years ago

I actually ran TCL in virtual machine and SSHed into it like this back when node.js only ran on linux well.

Karrot_Kream• 8 years ago

Judging by the comments, it seems like people haven't realized yet that the distribution is precisely this small so the entire thing can run in RAM. TinyCore wants to be super fast, so they try and got everything in RAM.

woliveirajr• 8 years ago

At 11MB, it could be located inside the L3 cache on some processors [0] :)

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haswell_%28microarchitecture%2...

ReverseCold• 8 years ago

Is that something that might be doable/useful? Or just a size comparison?

eliben• 8 years ago

On disk size != memory footprint though. It may occupy 11MB as a binary but allocate way more than that at runtime.

[nitpicking, of course :)]

feelin_googley2• 8 years ago

Some people perhaps are missing this. Others surely understand.

Personally, I have been running my computers this way for many years now. I do not use Linux kernel, but like "tinycore" everything fits in RAM. Size range is usually about 13-17MB for x86.

The USB stick or other boot media with the kernel+bootloader can be removed after boot. Depending on how much free RAM I have to spare, I can overlay larger userlands on top of this, and chroot into them. With todays RAM sizes, I can hold an entire "default base" (BSD) in memory if desired.

This filesystem on the media is not merely an "install" image. It has everything I need to do work, including custom applications. If I want distributions sets I download them; they are not stored on the media.

In normal use, I do not use any disk. Therefore I do not use a swap file.

Recently on HN a discussion of sorting came up, and I mentioned the issue of sorting large datasets using only RAM, no disk. Obviously BSD and other UNIX-like kernels date back to a time of severely constrained memory and are designed around space-saving concepts like "virtual memory" and "swap", "shared libraries", etc.

When one runs from RAM with no disk, working with large files means "thrashing" is a real possibility. Aside: Did the architects of virtual memory contemplate a world where users are doing work without using HDDs or other writeable permanent storage. (Start a new thread if want to answer/debate this.)

Sorting large files is something I do regularly so I am always open to new ideas. Currently I use k/kdb+ for large files instead of UNIX sort.

Here's the reply I got:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16086791

breakingcups• 8 years ago

What do you use? BSD?

valarauca1• 8 years ago

the answer you are looking for to your core question is “No”.

Generally all kernels will assume _some_ backing store. The reason for this is dealing with RAM being full.

This is because updating MMU is generally expensive, so it’s easier to mark an address as belonging to your process, and commit the pages after the fact.

Now this can be changed in settings. Ensure pages are backed before allocated, and running swap off can be done.

But then EVERY and let me repeat EVERY SINGLE piece of code you run has to able to handle malloc failing gracefully. And next to none do. This is a strange condition because how you handle it depends on your kernel configuration, and how much stack you have left. Which is difficult to know unless you wrote every piece of code FOR your custom kernel config.

Ultimately just having swap enabled and assuming a back store is easier. The few places where you get away with 100% ram and a read only store is embedded (generally, not always) and in these conditions you can closely tie software to kernel configuration.

dozzie• 8 years ago

[...]it seems like people haven't realized yet that the distribution is precisely this small so the entire thing can run in RAM.

I do the same with stock Debian. Not an achievement to simply run from RAM only.

trendia2• 8 years ago

I'd also look into Buildroot [0]. I'm currently using Buildroot for a project and the whole distribution (including libraries and executables) is under 40MB. Since I am using a fixed dev board (i.e. peripherals are not going to change), I used lsmod to detect which drivers are needed and only build those, which really shrinks the kernel.

Buildroot also includes a cross compiler, so that you can rebuild the entire toolchain, kernel, and libraries in one go.

[0] https://github.com/buildroot/buildroot

OrangeTux• 8 years ago

Buildroot is great! I'm using it to build distributions for several pieces of embedded hardware.

But I think Buildroot targets different hardware than Tiny Core. Buildroot targets embedded systems. It therefore lacks a package manager. Tiny core seems to target bigger systems, like notebooks, servers and desktops.

devonkim• 8 years ago

I was under the impression that if you really want to optimize for space that you should avoid kernel module overhead entirely and build in your modules statically. Maybe it only saves a few bytes and a couple clock cycles at load time but it sounds like it’s worth a try for you.

trendia2• 8 years ago

Oh sorry, I wasn't clear about that. I run it first where every possible module is built 'M', and then once the system boots up, run lsmod to see which modules are loaded.

Then, I take that list of modules and set them to "Y", and disable everything else. That way, needed libraries are statically linked and unneeded libraries aren't built at all.

mankash666• 8 years ago

Point to note: many Alpine Linux base docker images are in the 6MB ballpark.

What's tiny core's advantage over Alpine? Given the outsized interest in Alpine from the docker community, it may have better packages and security updates

Siecje• 8 years ago

Correct me if I'm wrong but a docker image doesn't include a kernel.

ffk• 8 years ago

You are correct, docker images don't generally contain kernels (and if they do, they don't load them).

A more apt comparison would be vs alpine standard which is 109 MB and contains a kernel.

limeblack2• 8 years ago

My favorite thing to do with TCL is to create a live distro[1] that boots of off usb/cd and eject[2] the device it boots off of entirely while the OS is still running. I would do this in libraries/cafes all the time. No device plugged into the computer but running a different OS.

[1] http://forum.tinycorelinux.net/index.php?topic=8924.0

[2] http://forum.tinycorelinux.net/index.php/topic,8522.0.html

eat_veggies• 8 years ago

Ooh, that sounds really handy! I've been using Arch with ramroot[0] on my USB for this purpose, although it takes a minute or two to transfer everything to RAM.

[0] https://github.com/arcmags/ramroot

thomastjeffery2• 8 years ago

Back when I was in High School, I would boot a floppy with UnetBootin (the BIOS did not support USB boot), and boot a flash drive with TinyCore, then put the floppy and flash drive back in my pocket. I would end up with a working browser before anyone else was able to login to Windows XP, and my computer wouldn't freeze, crash, etc.

gbraad• 8 years ago

tomsrtbt

andrewstuart• 8 years ago

I built something to boot Tiny Core Linux (and other Run-From-RAM OS's) on Amazon, Digital Ocean or Google Compute Engine - http://www.bootrino.com

Tiny Core Linux

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