There's a lot of reasons to have a portable USB Linux setup that does something else than actually duplicating the Live CD of distro X. With Tiny Core that's different, since it does away with the solid squashfs setup that most live distros have and, if you follow the steps outlined in this tutorial, you'll also get a real home folder, not some copy-on-write persistence loopback file. Note: the following tutorial has been originally written as a plain text file and it is presented below as such. Some commands, if not run carefully, can become dangerous to your data, so I can only advise you to keep your eyes open for any mistakes. Other than that, I'm open to questions, so don't hesitate to leave a comment.
== Installing Tiny Core on a USB drive ==
== the ext2 way ==
In this tutorial I will walk you through installing Tiny Core Linux on a
USB drive in a way that will enable it to maintain top speed while including
useful features like persistence and low RAM usage.
* Prerequisites:
- an existing Linux system with fdisk and extlinux;
- an USB drive >= 128MB;
* Getting the goods.
Since we're talking Tiny Core here, we might as well start with getting the
ISO image that will form the base of our fresh USB drive installation. The
latest version can always be found at:
http://distro.ibiblio.org/pub/linux/distributions/tinycorelinux/3.x/release/tinycore-current.iso
Just get it with wget or something, it's a small download.
With that taken care of, it's time to prepare the USB drive.
* Preparing the USB drive.
I'm assuming that the USB drive you'll be installing to is a spare one that
you have laying around. If that's not the case, back up everything from it,
since the next step _WILL WIPE IT CLEAN_.
Also, all the following utilities require super-user permissions, so you will
either have to prefix their respective commands with "sudo", or just go with
"su" once.
With the drive firmly inserted into a USB port, you'll want to umount it.
Then open a terminal and, replacing X with the appropriate letter, do a:
fdisk /dev/sdX
Fdisk will open and will present you with an interactive mode that requires
you to enter one letter commands. I will further write these commands in this
form: [C], meaning that you'll press the "c" key then Enter.
First up, we will disable DOS compatibility, since it's of no use to us or
to Tiny Core. Enter [C], and fdisk should reply with "DOS Compatibility flag
is not set." Then press [U], so that everything will be displayed in sectors
instead of cylinders {EW!}.
With that out of the way, we want to make sure that the partition table on
the USB drive is in order, and we'll do that with [O]. That should return
"Building a new DOS disklabel with disk identifier {some hex value}."
Now that we're all set up, it's time to create the ext2 partition that will
receive our fresh Tiny Core setup. To do that, enter [N], then [P], then [1].
For the first sector and last sector inputs, just confirm the default values
by pressing Enter. This whole series of commands created for us a primary
partition that covers the whole drive.
A couple more commands, and we'll be done with fdisk. We'll want to set the
partition type to 83, to mark it as a Linux partition. That can be achieved
with [T] followed by [83]. Then we'll mark the partition as active by pressing
[A], then [1]. This way the systems that will be booting from the USB drive
will know on what partition to look for the files - partition 1 in our case.
That pretty much concludes the fdisk step, so we'll write everything to disk
by pressing [W]. Fdisk should say "The partition table has been altered!", then
quit.
Now we have a USB drive with a neat partition, but we have no filesystem.
Time to create one:
mkfs.ext2 -L "tc" /dev/sdX1
Of course, replace X with the appropriate letter for the USB drive. The
mkfs.ext2 command just created an ext2 filesystem on the partition, and labeled
it "tc".
Now the most comfortable step to have the partition mounted and to make sure
that the kernel is up to date with the modifications we made is to run
eject sdX
then pop the USB out of the port and insert it back. By now your desktop
environment should have automagically mounted the partition to /media/tc.
I will assume that is the case, so all the following commands will reflect
that situation. If it's different in your case, alter them accordingly.
* Getting TinyCore on the USB drive
Now that we have a clean base for our install, it's time to proceed. To place
the required files on there, we'll first need to access them, by mounting the
ISO image. Easy, right?
mount -o loop -t iso9660 tinycore-current.iso /mnt
This made the contents of the ISO image accessible in the /mnt folder. Now
to copy them onto the USB partition:
cp -R /mnt/boot /media/tc/
We're done with the ISO image, so we might as well get rid of it.
umount tinycore-current.iso
rm tinycore-current.iso
We have the files on the USB drive, but they came from a CD, so the
bootloader configuration is tailored for CD media. Let's fix it:
cd /media/tc/boot/
mv isolinux extlinux
mv extlinux/isolinux.cfg extlinux/extlinux.conf
rm extlinux/isolinux.bin
You may have noticed "extlinux" pop up in those commands. That is the
bootloader we're gonna use. We could have used grub, but I don't think the
added complexity is really warranted in our simple boot case. We won't be
taking care of the bootloader install right now, we'll leave that for last.
We also need to make a couple of directories that Tiny Core needs:
mkdir -p /media/tc/tce/optional
mkdir /media/tc/opt
What we will take care of is tuning the boot parameters so that Tiny Core
will know what devices to use and how to use them for maximum performance.
As you'd expect, the drive designation won't stay the same as the USB drive
is used on different computers, so we need another way of referring to it
instead of /dev/sdX1. Luckily, when we formatted the partition, it also
received a unique identification in the form of a long alphanumeric string.
To find out that string, we need to run:
blkid -s UUID /dev/sdX1
This command will output something along the lines of
/dev/sdX1: UUID="{some long string}" - copy the UUID= part, because we
will need it in this next step.
Now open extlinux/extlinux.conf in your favorite text editor. This file
contains several lines that detail what kernel to use and how that kernel
should be started. We are interested in the "append initrd={...} line.
To this line we are going to add several things:
waitusb=5 tce=UUID="..." restore=UUID="..." home=UUID="..." opt=UUID="..."
Note that you will need to insert the actual UUID string that you obtained
from the blkid command instead of "...". Also, the file might be read only, but
that can be quickly fixed with a "chmod +w extlinux.conf"
Let's go over the added tags:
- waitusb=5 tells tiny core to wait for 5 seconds before searching for USB
devices. This might be needed in case the drive isn't detected that fast.
You're free to try smaller values, or remove the waitusb bit completely.
However, I advise you to keep it for compatibility reasons.
The other four parameters (tce, restore, home, opt) tell Tiny Core to store
packages on the USB drive, to look for back-ups in there and, finally, to place
the home and opt folders on that same partition.
Additionally, you might want to add some other parameters. You can read all
about those in the extlinux folder, by opening the text files named "f2"
and "f3".
We're almost done, it's time to add that missing bootloader. Assuming that
you have syslinux/extlinux installed, it's just a matter of running
extlinux -i /media/tc/boot/extlinux
This doesn't output much, but it does give us an info that we'll use in the
next step: "/media/tc/boot/extlinux is device /dev/sdX1". Remember that
"/dev/sdX" part.
With that we've taken care of the partition boot sector, but that doesn't
mean that the USB drive's master boot record is as we want it to be. Again,
assuming that you have syslinux installed, you can fix that quickly:
cat /usr/share/syslinux/mbr.bin > /dev/sdX
where "/dev/sdX" is the device that was identified by extlinux. Also note that
the trailing "1" was omitted, since we are referring to the whole USB drive,
not the first partition.
That's it, we're mostly done. The Tiny Core install is ready, all you need
to do now is make sure all the data has been written to disk, then you can
reboot and take it for a spin:
cd /
eject sdX
reboot
* Finishing notes
Once you have booted your fresh new TinyCore install, you should edit the
/opt/.filetool.list text file, and remove the "home/" line. That way, you
won't end up with large quantities ofduplicate copies of files on the
partition and in the back-up when you shutdown the system.
This tutorial covers only a small portion of what you can do with Tiny Core.
If you want to do more complex things, read up on what can be achieved with
this operating sistem at http://tinycorelinux.com/. Also, the wiki has quite
a lot of valuable information - http://wiki.tinycorelinux.com/tiki-index.php