I had a feeling that this Tiny Core Linux It was a good thing and no, not because it doesn’t weigh either, I mean, it’s also something brilliant, but more than that, it’s what I’ve come to tell you.
When I read that a new GNU / Linux distro of only 10 MB had appeared I thought it was something infumable, and when I saw one or another screenshot I took it more seriously, at least it did not have a window manager monstrosity but jwm.
It has access to a good number of packages and can be installed both on the hard drive and on a pendrive, of course, “by hand” without the assistants of some distros.
It reminds me of the impression it made on me the first time I heard about Damn Small Linux but I always tried it and I did not like it, now I wanted to know Tiny Core was decent or as uncomfortable as the other … and I tried it.
By the way, it connects to the Internet via DHCP, so if the router is properly configured it starts the Internet by itself, but if not, it doesn’t work very well.
How much is 10 MB
I decided to try it on QEMU, but this program is a bit slow and I had never tried anything else, so I decided on VirtualBox OSE (the free version) that is in the Debian repositories and is simpler to use and works much better. By the way something highly recommended to change that, sometimes limited QEMU.
I started it up and I found an empty desktop and a menu with few options … but with a very cute dock (I think it’s AWN, but I’m not sure) and nice to look at, within a screen space that never exceeds the 1024 x 768, the VESA driver (the simple one, with which everything goes).
As it does not have almost any programs to use, we have to install them one by one, according to our needs, which is good because we organize ourselves.
Unlike DSL your packages are unique (which has certain disadvantages) and has a graphical environment to install things called App Browser, which is a tool that shows you the available packages, a small search engine, the install button, the download button and nothing else. The packages themselves are termination .tce, .tcem or .tcel depending on whether they come alone, with a module or a library, but in the end they are all installed with a double click. The strange thing is that it does not appear how a package is uninstalled, I have not discovered that yet xD, but it is definitely not there.
The fact is that it shows all the available packages (there is no more repository than the one they show you or mirrors that are the same) and to navigate what they offer you is Minefield (firefox) in version 3, something unthinkable considering the issue of 10 MB and the low memory of the computers. Well, I had configured my machine with 256 RAM and it worked perfectly well, in QEMU opening Minefield was torture, but with VirtualBox it behaved like a real PC and opened it well and as I needed it, no more than 4 tabs and with some other open program.
As absolutely everything requires installation, I also needed a text editor, although it is one of the few things that it brings, a Vi and since I am not a programmer and it bothers me that things are hackneyed because yes, I installed a dwarf which is also text but is “more normal” and enough for me.
All the installations worked excellently, so I did try to install a little program, the scrotum to take the captures from the same system and I was not able to install it due to broken dependencies despite installing the build package as it was not in the repositories.
Taking a couple of screenshots “from the outside” and then even having browsed all the possible sites (has flash 9 as package), I turned off the server very happy with the experience despite the simplicity of everything.
Notes
As an experiment it’s great, I really enjoyed using it and downloading the packages to be able to use it. Obviously there is a problem if what we want is to use it to arrive and use with a CD, we would have to install many things starting from the browser.
But I loved it.
Did you like this distro too?
Has anyone else tried it?
If you dared to try it download Tiny Core Linux in a virtual machine or on a pendrive
