• TinyCoreLinux

http://tinycorelinux.net/

TCL is great for small computers, like the Raspberry Pi. I've put it on the RPi Zero W to act as a tang server. Running version 9 at the moment, because version 11 is still in beta, from early 2020 or so.

Initial wifi setup

The ZeroW is a little tricky because it only has wifi, and the stock image doesn't include that. Easy enough to fix, though the official wiki is down-ish at the moment.

• Official wiki page, via archive-org: https://web.archive.org/web/20191011060430/http://wiki.tinycorelinux.net/picore:pi_zero_w_wifi

• Forum page that started it: http://forum.tinycorelinux.net/index.php/topic,21134.15.html

Download piCore-9.0.3.zip from http://tinycorelinux.net/9.x/armv6/releases/RPi/

dd it to the SD card: dd bs=1m if=piCore-9.0.3.img of=/dev/rdisk3 conv=sync

run fdisk and manually extend the second partition to something more reasonable

do a resize2fs to grow the filesystem

Download all these extensions needed for wifi:

mkdir required; cd required
for pkg in libiw libnl readline wifi wireless-4.9.22-piCore wireless_tools wpa_supplicant firmware-rpi3-wireless; do
    for f in $pkg.tcz{,.dep,.md5.txt} ; do
        wget http://ftp.nluug.nl/os/Linux/distr/tinycorelinux/9.x/armv6/tcz/$f;
    done; \
done

copy them to the just-grown second partition /mnt/mmcblk0p2/tce/optional/

Install the extensions immediately, and add them to the onboot list for future boots:

tce-load -i firmware-rpi3-wireless
tce-load -i wifi
echo firmware-rpi3-wireless.tcz >> ../onboot.lst
echo wifi.tcz >> ../onboot.lst

Connect to wifi and make it persistent:

sudo wifi.sh (and select an AP and enter password)
echo "wifi.sh -aw" >> /opt/bootlocal.sh
echo "/etc/wpa_supplicant.conf" >> /opt/.filetool.lst
sudo filetool.sh -b

sudo exitcheck.sh reboot

Building extensions

Not all that different to building RPMs! Kinda.

• Submission for the repo: http://forum.tinycorelinux.net/index.php/topic,330.45.html

• https://web.archive.org/web/20191109095842/http://wiki.tinycorelinux.net/wiki:creating_extensions

There's not really a process there per se, and it's not all that repeatable, but it's not bad.

More exhaustive logs and notes on /BuildingExtensions.