While looking for a super small Linux distro for an upcoming project, I came across Tiny Core Linux(TCL). After setting it up in a Proxmox vm, I now have a system that books in just arround ~10 seconds - pretty awesome! Here are the quirks I found while setting it up:

Setup

  1. Assuming you are also using Proxmox, you need to make sure that the disk type you are trying to install to is ide not the default scsi. For whatever reason TCL doesn’t recognize scsi disk.

  2. You need to install the install script. It doesn’t come pre-loaded on the system like many distros. Install by using the tce command to search for “install”

  3. Before running the install script you need to use fdisk to make partitions

    1. If you plan on having persistant files/folders you need atleast 2 paritions

Persistance

Now that you have a bootable system (from disk, not iso), you may want to persist some data after shutdown. By default nothing is saved (Besides installed packages?).

If you look in the /opt/ directory there is a file called .filetool.lst this contains two entries by default:

# .filetool.lst
home
opt

These are the folders that will be backed up when using the backup command.

By default these will be restored on boot, so you may want to add config files to the /opt/.filetool.lst to persist configs.

Cool! But where does it backup to?

Backups are stored in /mnt/sda1/tce/ or the equivilent drive name, it just so happns that my system has sda1 as the drive/partition name.

The config settings for this are stored in /mnt/sda1/tce/boot/extlinux/extlinux.conf. If you were to cat this file you would see the last line starts with “APPEND”. Inside this line you should see tce=UUID="<disk-uuid>". This means that the disk with that UUID has the “tce” directory and it should restore from there.

You can view all the possible options for “APPEND” here.

Login

Lets say that you are getting closer to production of your system that’s running TCL. You will probably want to set a password and would like to stop the system from auto logging-in on boot. Looking at the link above we see that we can add noautologin to prevent the second issue, of, autologin.

But how to we set a password and have it persist thru the next book?

Well, we just need to:

  1. Set a password using passwd

  2. Make sure that /etc/shadow is persisted. To do this add “etc/shadow/” to your /opt/.filetool.lst, then run the backup command to save. Now when you powercycle the machine it will no longer drop you into a shell on boot, it will ask for a username/password combo.

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