on the Tiny Core Linux wiki

Who - am I?: I'm Lee, a long time user of Tiny Core Linux.

• Professionally - Mumps programmer, network admin, customer service rep, EDI programmer - all at the same time.
  
• I've Been programming in various capacities since about 1982.
  
• Privately: 50'ish, married, kids.
  

Where - am I?: Geographically: I'm in Apollo, Pennsylvania, U.S.A. _{“Apollo” is apparently a latin word meaning “fearless” (literally, “without chicken”) (I made that up.)}

When - I'm updating this 2017-03-28 after about four years of neglect. Oops.

What - will I write about?: Beats me… you'll know as soon as I do. :) But some likely subjects coming up will be:

• Core 8.x, since I'm playing around with the beta lately
• GRUB2 and switching to it from grub4dos, since I'm playing around with that in conjunction with Core 8.x
• extension building, since I have a few I want to package up
• remastering, just for the fun of it

Why - am I doing this?: Because I can, and it might just help someone to enjoy their computer or operating system a little more.

Who - is my intended audience?: You are - you likely got here from the Tiny Core Linux forums and you were curious enough to follow my link.

A screenshot of my jwm desktop

This is Core linux loaded up in the usual way with Xlibs, Xprogs and Xvesa, followed by jwm and wbar.

The background image is from the envane theme as used in DSL 3.1. The image has been gimped out to 1920×1080 for use on modern lcd screens, so not all of it shows on this old 1024×768 display.

jwm has been tweaked to provide a double row of desktops in the pager and a “Core” button (that brings up a personal menu, not subject to having stuff added to it by the system).

The three big buttons on the tray are a rudimentary tcl-tk applet that has been “swallowed” into the tray. The “conky” and “xonclock” buttons toggle an onscreen analog clock (not shown) and the conky display. The “smbpanel” button brings up a separate tcl-tk applet that provides buttons for mounting and umounting some samba shares.

wbar (bottom center, almost inivisble) is configured to be about 95% transparent until the user mouses over it. I've done away with the motion and zooming of the icons:

# The Bar && Font && Font size (11)
i: /usr/local/share/wbar/osxbarback.png
t: /usr/share/fonts/luxisr/11
c: -bpress -pos bottom -zoomf 1.0 -jumpf 0 -nanim 1 -isize 24 -filter 1 -fc ffff9f1f -balfa 1 -falfa 5

All of the default Core icons except the terminal one have been moved to Core tray button menu items.

The backup statistics at the top of the conky display come from environment variables, so conky is run from a script that refreshes their values before starting conky. A new backup won't be reflected in the display until conky is restarted.

The filesystem graphs are a static listing in .conky rc with logic to only show the file system if its mount point actually exists and only show the graph if the filesystem is actually mounted. This makes the display look the way I want it but also makes .conkyrc a bit unwieldy as it has to account for all of sd<a-d><1-9> and hd<a-d><1-9> (Although I think nowadays I can do away with hd?? and the graphs never show up for sdd?. I think the sdd? graphs issue is a conky bug.)
The .conkyrc for the screenshot above (external link)

This is a test of the discussion tab for the user page for article My Talk for user Lee.

A screenshot of my jwm desktop

Well, it's been a while, due in part to me being lazy and in part to the wiki being only partially functional for so long. Major kudos to Team Tiny Core for getting the wiki back under control.

In the 7 and a half years since my last post, some things have changed but, of course, some have not… What's the same:

• Still using Core as my primary OS, but now I'm on Core 15.0 and on x86_64. I still keep an old Win 7 Pro tower around but these days I only use it for email (in the process of moving that to my primary Tiny Core machine) and that one old flash game that I still play once a day.
• Still using jwm but a newer version and and have learned much more about configuring it to my preferences.
• Still using the same wall paper (envane) - I find it very relaxing - though on 8 of the 10 desktops in my “pager” I've fiddled with the colors. Tweaking it to purple, for instance, is kind of neat looking but I still prefer the original color as shown in the screen shot.
• Still using conky, though I've tweaked the settings on it to make it appear very muted against the wallpaper image. That color does clash a bit with certain of the different colored wall papers (especially that purple one) and disappears entirely on others. I got rid of the gauges and stuck with text and regular graphs,
• Still using wbar, though I've made it vertical and wedged it in between the conky display and the right hand edge of the screen.
• Still using grub2 boot loader but now following Juanito's excellent instructions (see the forum) for multi-boot USB sticks that will work on UEFI machines -and- BIOS machines.

What's different:

• No longer working in IT
• No longer living where I was before, though I'm in the same general area
• My kids are no longer exactly “kids”
• I have newer computer hardware (and am actually retiring some of the old stuff)
• I've finally got a native linux version of my favorite text editor, a commercial product called “epsilon” from Lugaru software. I've been using the same text editor in various versions since 1985, so having it on Tiny Core is a bigger deal than it probably sounds like.

In the mean time, I did learn how to remaster rootfs.gz, modules.gz and/or core.gz and found the process to be extremely simple. Then I proceeded to -not- do so because I realized that there was really nothing I -needed- to customize and the few things I -wanted- to customize were “vanity” tweaks, Then, in the intervening time since making that decision, I've found that maybe there are a few bits I might change or add, so I might have to revisit that.