May 162011
 

Hi all,

I’ve had a play around with Tiny Core Linux recently, and I’m amazed at how they have fit in a window manager and some basic utilities into 10 megabytes.
You start off with a very basic system, consisting of only the Window Manager, and Application manager.

With Tiny Core Linux, you install applications by downloading the tcz files, and loading them via the Application Manager. Alternatively you can remaster the default image to add more applications, which I will also cover later on as it can work extremely well in conjunction with netbooting.

So without further ado, onto the simple process of PXE booting Tiny Core !


Step 1 – Getting Tiny Core

As always, we need to get the files we need first before we can boot from them.

wget http://distro.ibiblio.org/tinycorelinux/3.x/release/tinycore-current.iso

We will grab the ISO file first, and then we will need to extract the files we need from the ISO.
Now from here, we have 2 options.
We can mount the ISO image and boot straight from that to achieve a basic system, or we can extract the files so that we can use them later on to create a remastered image for multiple use situations, e.g. net cafe or diskless workstations.

In this post, I will go with the former option of just mounting it and booting from that.
I will cover the extraction of files and remastering in the next post.

Step 2 – Mounting the ISO

We now need to create a directory on our tftp server so we have a place to mount the ISO file.

mkdir /tftpboot/tinycore

After we’ve done that, we can now use the mount command to mount the ISO in loopback mode.

mount -o loop tinycore-current.iso /tftpboot/tinycore

Once that’s mounted, we can now do a ls in /tftpboot/tinycore to see what’s in there.

ls /tftpboot/tinycore

Should see something similar to this :

This is the contents of the ISO file, which should contain just a ‘boot’ folder.

Step 3 – Configuring the boot menu

So once we have the files where we need them, we can now edit the pxelinux.cfg/default file to include Tiny Core.
We will need this codeblock in there :


LABEL tinycore
MENU LABEL Tiny Core 3.6
kernel tinycore/boot/bzImage
append initrd=tinycore/boot/tinycore.gz

So it should look something similar to this if you have been following my blog up until now :

Once that is complete, when you boot from the network, you should see Tiny Core 3.6 as an option in the menu now.

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  5 Responses to “How To : PXE Boot Tiny Core Linux”

  1. I did everything right, but during the boot gets stuck on the black screen written thus, tc@box:~$ _
    What can it be?

  2. I can’t see the pictures

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