Wednesday, January 28, 2009

Tiny Core Linux -- change operating mode.

The Getting Started page for TCL describes four different operating modes.
Up to now, I have used a "traditional HD install" and then a Frugal install without extensions.
Finally, I moved to the PPR/TCE mode which allowed me to start TCL up with all of my extensions installed and ready to use.
However as I described in this thread, boot time was not fast (70 seconds or more). This thread suggested using a PPI/TCE mode which involves running extensions from the HDD rather than from RAM. Because the extensions don't have to be loaded at boot time, booting is much faster. So, I decided to try it.
To make this change is actually very simple. What I did was the following:
1. Remove bootcode "tce=hdd7" and replace with "local=hdd7"
2. Create a directory /mnt/hdd7/tclocal (I renamed the existing directory /mnt/hdd7/tce to /mnt/hdd7/123tce)
3. Then reboot, which should install a number of directories within /mnt/hdd7/tclocal.
4. Reboot again and now booting should be much faster (38 seconds for me)

A problem I had in the mode of operation was that neither my ethernet nor my wireless connection would autostart.
Apparently this comment in this post is relevant here

Note that some things outside of /usr/local may have to be manually backed/restored, or it may be easier to remain as extensions

although I confess I really don't understand this as I can't really see that the rt2860sta and atl1e are missing from /usr/local (although maybe this is because I separately install them as TCEs on boot. I need to investigate this.
In any event, restoring the /mnt/hdd7/tce folder and placing within it rt2860sta.tcem and atl1e.tcem got both connections starting at boot again. Note that I did not have to restore the "tce=hdd7" boot code.
I had a similar problem with sound, which I couldn't get to start (see this thread), until I put OSS.tcem in /mnt/hdd7/tce.
Not only that but I also had to put libflashsupport.so in both /usr/lib and /usr/local/lib/opera/plugins/. Read about this here.
Note that I still have to re-install libflashsupport.so after every reboot. I don't understand why this is and I'll need to investigate. Of course, if there's no way around it, I can just write a simple script to be included in bootlocal.sh

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