An afternoon in Tiny Core

After slogging through Firefox in Ubuntu 10.04 for the morning, not the most satisfying experience on my 1.2 GHz Celeron system, I decided to run Tiny Core 2.11 in the afternoon.

I added Firefox 3.6, Geany, gFTP, Pidgin, MtPaint, and I was ready to go.

Compared to a "real" distribution like Ubuntu, Tiny Core has way fewer processes running on its much-more minimalist desktop, yet the way the apps sit in a doc at the bottom of the screen is very Macintosh OS X-like. Except here I have multiple desktops, many dozens of apps that can be installed by Tiny Core's package manager ... and I'm running a system that's as efficient as any I can remember. (Despite my aborted attempt to run Slitaz last week, I do remember that one as very, very fast and well-featured; I will try again).

I hesitate to set up a permanent Tiny Core save file on my Ubuntu-running system for three reasons: 1) I really don't understand Tiny Core all that much just yet, 2) My /home is encrypted, so I'd have to make the save file in / ... not that I won't do that, but I'm giving it some time, and 3) I'm OK at installing apps in Tiny Core but not so well-versed in removing them.

A couple of things: Sometimes dependencies are missing in Tiny Core apps. I had to add gstreamer in order to get Pidgin to work. But running the app in a terminal generally shows me the output of what I need (or close to it). A little bit of geek experience seems to be enough to get by in Tiny Core.

For work especially, my needs are specific and not totally out of hand. I haven't yet installed Flash, but it does work as well as it does anywhere (i.e. not all that well, but what can you do?). The Java runtime is available. I haven't yet figured out my sound issues, meaning how to get Tiny Core's Linux environment to output sound to my USB Headphone Set sound module (given that my internal sound module is dead).

I love running the system totally in RAM, and if I were doing this right I'd either have all my files in the Google cloud, in a non-encrypted /home on the hard drive or on a USB stick connected to this system.

One thing I can say about Tiny Core vs. my previous experience with Puppy and Damn Small Linux is that with TC it's a lot easier to build up exactly the system you want. I have more than a few "full-sized" apps in here — Firefox, OpenOffice. But I could be running just a Web browser and nothing more. Sometimes you need a lot of apps, sometimes one - it's nice to have that kind of flexibility without jumping through all sorts of hoops.

The developers of Tiny Core are clearly doing a very good, innovative thing here. I've met Robert Shingledecker at a couple of SCALE shows in L.A., and I'm glad to see him working on this project and being able to do it the way he wants.

Now I've got to start reading up on Tiny Core so I can get more of it figured out.