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Tiny Core Linux: a 23 MB Linux distro with graphical desktop

520 points by LorenDB

by hiAndrewQuinn

4 subcomments

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.
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.
This is actually how I have powered the backend data collection and processing for [2], as I wrote about in [3]. The end result is a static site built in Hugo but I was careful to pick parts I could safely leave to wheedle on their own for a long time.
[1]: https://til.andrew-quinn.me/posts/consider-the-cronslave/
[2]: https://hiandrewquinn.github.io/selkouutiset-archive/
[3]: https://til.andrew-quinn.me/posts/lessons-learned-from-2-yea...

by ifh-hn

7 subcomments

I'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.

by trollbridge

10 subcomments

Not 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.

by shiftpgdn

3 subcomments

This 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.

by gardnr

4 subcomments

I love lightweight distros. QNX had a "free as in beer" distro that fit on a floppy, with Xwindows and modem drivers. After years of wrangling with Slackware CDs, it was pretty wild to boot into a fully functional system from a floppy.

by veganjay

1 subcomments

I have an older laptop with a 32-bit processor and found that TinyCoreLinux runs well on it. It has its own package manager that was easy to learn. This distro can be handy in these niche situations.

by slim

0 subcomment

Tiny Core also runs from ramdisk, uses a packaging systems based on tarballs mounted in a fusefs and can be installed on a dos formatted usb key. It also has a subdistro named dCore[1] which uses debian packages (which it unpacks and mounts in the fusefs) so you get access to the ~70K packages of debian.
It's documentation is a free book : http://www.tinycorelinux.net/book.html
[1] https://wiki.tinycorelinux.net/doku.php?id=dcore:welcome

by noufalibrahim

5 subcomments

In around 2002, I got my hands on an old 386 which I was planning to use for teaching myself things. I was able to breathe life into it using MicroLinux. Two superformatted 1.44" floppy disks and the thing booted. Basic kernel, 16 colour X display, C compiler and Editor.
I don't know if there are any other options for older machines other than stripped down Linux distros.

by hypeatei

4 subcomments

The site doesn't have HTTPS and there doesn't seem to be any mention of signatures on the downloads page. Any way to check it hasn't been MITM'd?

by Grom_PE

1 subcomments

Tiny Core Linux fits nicely on a FAT32 EFI boot partition as a rescue OS.

by zer0tonin

0 subcomment

When I was a teenager, tiny core saved me for a few months. My laptop had died and all I could use until I got a replacement was an old desktop computer we had around with 256MB of RAM. It was around the end of the windows 7 era, so even Xubuntu was struggling on such an old computer.
Tiny Core ran surprisingly well and I could actually use it to browse the web and use IRC.

by devsda

0 subcomment

I've used it around early 2010s as a live cd to fix partitions etc. Definitely recommend as a lightweight distro.
Was a little tricky to install on disk and even on disk it behaved mostly like a live cd and file changes had to be committed to disk IIRC.
Hope they improved the experience now.

by Simplita

0 subcomment

Tiny Core has always amazed me. The amount of functionality they fit into such a small footprint shows how far you can go when you optimize for simplicity.

by nine_k

0 subcomment

/* On the website, body { font-size: 70%; } — why? To drive home the idea that it's tiny? The default font size is normally set to the value comfortable for the user, would be great to respect it. */

by snvzz

1 subcomments

For unknown reasons, tinycorelinux's website is geoblocked in Japan.

by accrual

1 subcomments

Could such a distro support my i486-DX4-100 system with 64MB of RAM? I've been looking for something other than Win95, NT4, and OpenBSD 6.8 to run on this box. :)

by supportengineer

0 subcomment

That’s even smaller than these!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bootable_business_card

by girvo

1 subcomments

I used to run Puppy Linux and then TCL (and its predecessor DSL) on a super old Pentium 3 laptop with like 700mb of RAM or something. Made it actually usable!

by haunter

0 subcomment

Another small one is the xwoaf (X Windows On A Floppy) rebuild project 4.0 https://web.archive.org/web/20240901115514/https://pupngo.dk...
Showcase video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8or3ehc5YDo
iso https://web.archive.org/web/20240901115514/https://pupngo.dk...
2.1mb, 2.2.26 kernel
>The forth version of xwoaf-rebuild is containing a lot of applications contained in only two binaries: busybox and mcb_xawplus. You get xcalc, xcalendar, xfilemanager, xminesweep, chimera, xed, xsetroot, xcmd, xinit, menu, jwm, desklaunch, rxvt, xtet42, torsmo, djpeg, xban2, text2pdf, Xvesa, xsnap, xmessage, xvl, xtmix, pupslock, xautolock and minimp3 via mcb_xawplus. And you get ash, basename, bunzip2, busybox, bzcat, cat, chgrp, chmod, chown, chroot, clear, cp, cut, date, dd, df, dirname, dmesg, du, echo, env, extlinux, false, fdisk, fgrep, find, free, getty, grep, gunzip, gzip, halt, head, hostname, id, ifconfig, init, insmod, kill, killall, klogd, ln, loadkmap, logger, login, losetup, ls, lsmod, lzmacat, mesg, mkdir, mke2fs, mkfs.ext2, mkfs.ext3, mknod, mkswap, mount, mv, nslookup, openvt, passwd, ping, poweroff, pr, ps, pwd, readlink, reboot, reset, rm, rmdir, rmmod, route, sed, sh, sleep, sort, swapoff, swapon, sync, syslogd, tail, tar, test, top, touch, tr, true, tty, udhcpc, umount, uname, uncompress, unlzma, unzip, uptime, wc, which, whoami, yes, zcat via busybox. On top you get extensive help system, install scripts, mount scripts, configure scripts etc.

by oso2k

1 subcomments

I love Tiny Core Linux for use cases where I need fast boot times or have few resources. Testing old PCs, Pi Zero and Pi Zero 2W are great use cases.

by anthk

0 subcomment

https://luxferre.top http://t3x.org
All of the minilaguages exposed there will run on TC even with 32MB of RAM.
On TC, set IceWM the default WM with no opaque moving/resizing as default and get rid of that horrible dock.

by bflesch

4 subcomments

Looks really nice, I like the idea.
But can they please empower a user interface designer to simply improve the margins and paddings of their interface? With a bunch of small improvements it would look significantly better. Just fix the spacing between buttons and borders and other UI elements.

0 subcomment

by retube

0 subcomment

As I updated my thinkpad to 32 GB of RAM this morning (£150) I remembered my £2k (corporate) thinkpad in 1999, running Windows 98, had 32 MB of RAM. And it ran full Office and Lotus notes just fine :)

by rcarmo

0 subcomment

This would be perfect if it had an old Mac OS 7 Platinum-like look and window shading.

by roscas

0 subcomment

It is so tiny that it is http only because https was too big...

by mannycalavera42

1 subcomments

for a moment I thought about a Corel Linux revamp :)

by vid

0 subcomment

OK but I need a Linux with GUI that is less than 1.44MB so it works with my floppy disk.

by alfiedotwtf

1 subcomments

“Tiny” :)
I remember booting Linux off a 1.44Mb floppy

by hit8run

0 subcomment

Is there a reason the site doesn't support HTTPS? For a distro offering ISO downloads, this seems like a meaningful security gap -> it makes MITM attacks trivial for anyone on the network path.

by theanonymousone

1 subcomments

Does it run docker?

by sfarcolacul987

0 subcomment

and who is using this?

by arschficknigger

0 subcomment

[flagged]

by deadbabe

1 subcomments

[flagged]