!Dumb terminal OS
 --- 
15 June 2026
 --- 
These notes were emailed to me by a friend. I'll
add my notes as I modify the OS to serve my needs.

> I'm very interested in your notes about how you
> configured your Tiny Core Linux systems. I en-
> countered TC at the start of my renunciation of
> Windows ~2010 and couldn't make heads or tails of
> it, but it's 16 years later now and I suspect
> it'll make more sense to me now.

My original notes were little more than lists of
commands to run. In the attached files I've tidied
them up a little and added some more short descrip-
tions, though there are probably still some gaps and
ambiguities. The ISO disc image can also be copied
to a USB/SD drive with "dd", but if you don't plan
to burn CDs/DVDs it can be easier to change things
in a disk image, although somehow I've made creating
the latter look more complicated.

> I'm curious about what you call its unusual design
> decisions.

Well the main thing is that the root ("/") file-
system doesn't exist on a disk partition but in the
core.gz file which is unpacked to RAM. That allows
installing everything in the FAT32 EFI partition
like I do in the disk image guide, and you can then
access files from OSs that don't support Linux file-
systems.

As the system's root file system is kept in RAM,
software installed conventionally by copying files
to standard locations is lost after a reboot, as
well as configuration changes. For adding software
beyond that supplied in the base system, an equival-
ent to software packages is used, called extensions.
Tiny Core Linux extensions are Gzip-compressed
Squashfs 4.x archives which are loop-mounted from
inside the "tce" directory residing on the partition
of a physical drive to a directory in /tmp/tcloop.
They use the ".tcz" file name extension.

By default all program files inside a mounted
extension are symlinked to locations within the
/usr/local directory of the root file system in RAM.
Alternatively in copy2fs mode the contents of the
extension are copied to the root file system, so
that the data is thereafter always accessed from RAM
until the next reboot. In either case the extensions
remain read-only, so they are always restored to
their original state after each reboot.

Extensions and their dependencies are downloaded and
installed (until next reboot) with the tce-load
command. Copy2fs mode is applied to all extensions
if a file named copy2fs.flg is in the "tce" direct-
ory, or to any extensions listed in a copy2fs.lst
file there. At boot-time, all extensions listed in
the onboot.lst file inside the "tce" directory are
automatically installed. This causes a delay during
the boot process which can be minimised by configur-
ing extensions in "ondemand" mode, where instead of
loading at boot-time, extensions are automatically
loaded when their associated executable/command is
first run.

To save configuration and general user files, files/
directories listed in /opt/.filetool.lst are saved
to mydata.tgz with the "backup" or "filetool.sh -b"
commands (excluding files/directories listed in the
/opt/.xfiletool.lst file). This tar.gz archive is
unpacked over the core.gz filesystem during start-up.
The "tce" directory on the physical file system
partition where extensions, mydata.tgz, etc. are
stored can be accessed within the OS at
/etc/sysconfig/tcedir.