I had previously reviewed Puppy Linux [1]. Today, in my quest for
holy and beautiful minimalism I will be writing about Tiny Core
Linux.
In my previous exploration of the Puppy-verse I had noted that
it was not quite my flavor of minimalism. To try to find a
different way to express this, Puppy is about trying to fit as
much as possible in its memory space, with the added parameter
of what can "reasonably" be loaded into RAM [2].
Tiny Core takes a different view of minimalism, one closer to my
design sense: start with how little you need, and then you build
up from there... The guy who wrote The Little Prince said
something to the effect of "perfection is not when there is
nothing left to add, but rather nothing left to take away." Well,
Tiny Core has taken it all away.
There is a 16 MB version for people who really know what they
are doing -- this is sometimes affectionately called Micro Core
-- but as I am just a dude on Spring Break looking for a decent-
sized project to tinker with, I treated myself to the luxurious
164.6 MB Tiny Core Plus. Now compare this 164.6 MB to the Bionic
Pup I played with at 371 MB, and Zorin "Lite"'s absurd 2.6 GB, which
is somehow more than Mint's 2.3 GB! That seems to be a crime.
Even going big as I did with Tiny Core Plus, there is so little
you can do that you are briefly in that idealized world where
there is only one way to do something,and that way is clunky work
with windows that look like something out of Window's 95 -- which
in this context I found charming [3].
Update. I was actually a little more annoyed with clunky windows
to do everything than I stated. Or maybe it is that the charm
wore off. But playing around again with TC I found that I could
also toggle around apps, or even get them to open in the first
place by holding alt+tab, which then opens a menu which can be
navigated with the arrow keys. Still not as nice of a binding for
me as GNOME terminals alt+number of tab I want, but better than
using a mouse.
+++
I did indeed pick a project of the right size for the amount of
time I had to play around with it. With the first USB stick I
had to tinker a bit to get the files I made, and eventually
Firefox, persist. This is basically a frugal installation,
where the USB holds the core, but a hardrive gets mounted and
the extra stuff gets saved. With a second USB stick, I used the
installer program which comes with Tiny Core and made it so files
and programs that I add save to the USB, a live disk that loads
into RAM, leaving nothing behind when the session is over. This
one comes in at little under 300 MB, leaving over 15 GB to grow
into even with the cheapest USB stick I could get at Walmart.
I left my live USB to be my safe search stick, and then tricked
out -- in my fashion -- the frugal install. It has Nano, Aspell,
and Lynx, so I can word process, spell check, and look up quick
facts while still in terminal respectively.
This set up worked well for the quiet of the night after our
daughter was put off in her crib -- which she has taken to well,
thankfully. There are other times I might write that call for
music. During those times, I have a few other computers in my
collection that will do.
But for the times when the day has been long and having anything
else available would only serve as temptation or distraction,
this is the truly perfect set up.
+++
[1] Puppy Linux is technically a grouping of distros around a
similar philosophy and using similar tools.
[2] There is an additional criteria that Puppy in practice uses
to pick what to cram in: stuff that would have been appreciated
in the Golden Age of Windows. Old people really should use it to
keep their old machines running... But good luck convincing them.
[3] Less charming is the lack of "man" being loaded... yup,
even man files are left out to make this Core even tinier.
That's how hardcore these people are.
--
This work is hereby in the public domain.
Do what you want with it.
