Tinycore Linux

Tiny Core Linux has a version for Raspberry Pis called piCore [0] that I wish more people would look at, because it loads itself entirely into RAM and does not touch the SD card at all after that until and unless you explicitly tell it to. Phenomenal for those low powered servers you just want to leave on and running some tiny batch of cronjobs [1] or something for months or years at a time without worrying too much about…

I use a similar distro, Puppy, because it has the ability to copy its squashed file system (SFS) files to RAM and then continue running with the persistent storage medium detached. It has certain peculiarities like defaulting to logging in and running everything other than web browsers as root, so I’d like to switch to Tinycore if it’s different in that respect. My main concern is package availability — Puppy is compatible with the repos of major distros like Ubuntu.

I've been using TC for multiple projects involving Thin Client hardware provisioned in remote locations (such as remote security cameras at a festival and POS nodes/signage displays/twitter walls at conferences) and it really is a great project. Being able to run a complete distribution off a cheap 128MB CF card is a great thing, especially because the packaging process for TC is really simple - packages are simply squashfs files being mounted to / after booting. Customization and deployment (editing…