I'm thinking about getting into TinyCore again

MikeRocor welcome to the forums.

We are all learning here that building one's own distro is much harder than some other people think.
 


I managed to get it all sorted. The installer is very confusing but easy to install the OS to ssd/hdd once figured out. I can now begin to build my desktop I've already have Opera and LibreOffice installed but next I will need to look for some essentials like a graphics driver and a battery meter. I forgot to check whether TinyCore supports TRIM for solid state drives I'm assuming it does...
 
Hi wendy-lebaron, thanks for the welcome.

Back in the Tiny Core 4.x days, I tried my hand at remastering the Tiny Core initrd, just making some cosmetic tweaks to prove to myself that I could. It was easy and I was all set to really personalize it and have my own personal "vanity" distro.

Then I stopped and thought to myself, "Why would I ever do this?" The developers of Tiny Core, RobertS and his amazing team, have already factored out pretty much everything I would want to modify. Oh, I might throw out "on demand" loading of extensions, since that's something I can't imagine ever using, but that would gain me... -nothing-. A couple of times, I've thought of features that would be really handy to add - only to find out they were already in there.

So, for me, at least, "building my own distro" is a non-starter. I just add to Tiny Core whatever software I need for a given use case and do whatever tweaks I want at boot time.
 
There are lots of things I want to do in TinyCore. I want to get rid of the dock and have icons on the desktop instead or make my own bar where I can have the icons I'd make it round or oval shaped instead of the boring square or regular bar. I want my OS to look different from all the rest but I know that will be much harder than it sounds so I will have to start with the basics. I've never really liked those docks. I'm going to start with a purple plum theme to start with but first I need to get drivers and essentials.
 
There are lots of things I want to do in TinyCore. I want to get rid of the dock and have icons on the desktop instead or make my own bar where I can have the icons I'd make it round or oval shaped instead of the boring square or regular bar. I want my OS to look different from all the rest but I know that will be much harder than it sounds so I will have to start with the basics. I've never really liked those docks. I'm going to start with a purple plum theme to start with but first I need to get drivers and essentials.
Hmmm... The "dock" in Tiny Core is "wbar" and it has a bunch of options for cutomizing the look and feel, and positioning on the screen, though nothing for putting the icons on the desktop itself.

I think someone set up desktop icons (maybe using one of the file managers?) a few years back. I didn't pay much attention to it at the time as I find wbar to be kind of neat. I'll see if I can dig up that thread and find out what they were using. (Later...) At a glance, it looks like they were using pcmanfm file manager and/or icewm window manager.

When I don't just use the default background and wbar settings, I set wbar to use muted colors that (kind of) blend in with my background and use tiny little icons with almost no zoom on mouseover so the whole bar is almost invisible until the mouse moves over it. On a small screen (like a netbook), I use a vertical wbar along the left side so I can gain as much vertical screen real estate (more lines of code!) and still be able to access the bar.
 
That is cool I haven't yet explored the wbar much, I've been concentrating on other things within the desktop. I'll take a look at the wbar tomorrow and see what I can do with it.

My desktop plum idea is from the 80s when many computers were named after fruit, there was apricot a computing company from Birmingham and there was Acorn from Cambridge you had Tangerine although I don't think Tangerine made it into the desktop computer era but Acorn went quite far right into 1995 and by 1998 they were finished. Acorn were well ahead of there time. apricot had desktop computers but I think they went out around the 486 era PC's but they made some handheld devices for a little while after before vanishing into history. There were also Cherry computers but those just ran ordinary Windows. So that is where my Plum OS originates from that I'm going to make from TinyCore.
 
One feature I would like to add to my Plum OS is something that RISC OS had where you press F12 and it takes you into BBC Basic but I understand BBC Basic is old now although its still fun to make little programs in Basic so maybe I could have both Python and BBC Basic available its probably going to be very difficult getting Basic to run in Linux but much easier to have Python and put that in my F12 feature where it opens under the desktop. This is a distant plan as I'm not yet experienced with building desktop environments so I would have to start with the very basics first. My TinyCore system is comming along nicely although there have been a few issues with some apps not working due to something else being missing that needs to be installed.
 
Purebasic is commercial, is too heavy and leans too much toward Debian-Ubuntu homeland. One good thing is that apps could be created with it which use Qt or GTK toolkits for GUI programs. I am a licensed user but liked v4.6 best and haven't used it in years. To me QB64 Phoenix Edition is better although that (and its current developers) leans a lot toward Windows.

Freebasic might not request as many dependencies if one is interested in doing only console programs. It might be enough to install "libtinfo5 (legacy)" (naming how the library is called on Debian) which should pull in "ncurses". Will also need "gcc" but probably only for its assembler. Freebasic creates console-only executables which are smaller than those from QB64(PE) but larger than those from Purebasic <-- another reason why that one is payware.

There is also BaCON but that relies too much on "gcc" or Tiny C Compiler (which seems to be no longer maintained) and the BASIC dialect it has is too weird. But could do Internet stuff with it.
 


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