If you are a Windows user, have you ever wondered how difficult it would be to work with or experiment with tinycore?
This is because many people would find it inconvenient to boot into tinycore every time they need to make a small change, cook up a package, or simply experiment.
I have a great suggestion that would ease your pains. You can actually boot tinycore within a virtual machine like Oracle VirtualBox. This will allow you to boot TinyCore as a “window” within your existing OS, and even works on Windows!
There are 3 ways of doing this, of which the last one I like best. The last one is a Hybrid Boot setup, allowing booting TinyCore from a disk partition after the BIOS, and also within Windows itself as a VirtualBox VM instance reading from the same disk partition.
Note: This tutorial emphasizes on Safety. There is very very little chance of corrupting your hard-drive or existing Operating System. For example, VBoxManage commands restricts write to only the new partition.
Download the ISO of your choice (TinyCore, CorePlus, or Core). Start VirtualBox, click on New, which will start the New Virtual Machine Wizard, and click Next. Enter a VM name, and select OS Type Linux version Linux 2.6. Select how much memory you want to use, remembering that TinyCore caches everything in memory, so the more memory, the better. The next step allows you to create a virtual hard disk. If you will want to install TinyCore to disk, go ahead and create one. The default minimum of 8 gigabytes is fine. Otherwise, uncheck the checkbox, and click Next. At the last screen, click Create. You will be sent back to the VirtualBox main screen. Select your new VM, and click on Start, this will start the First Run Wizard. Click Next and at the Select Installation Media screen, click on the directory browsing icon, and navigate to the location of the ISO you downloaded earlier. Select the ISO, click Next and click Start. The new VM should boot, and you should see the TinyCore boot prompt.
The tutorial here will be slightly more complicated as you would need to initialize a .vdi virtual-disk file, then perform installation of Tinycore on the virtual disk.
The tutorial here will be slightly more tedious, but not more complicated, exploiting a lesser known feature that allows VBox to boot from a physical partition residing on your disk.
This produces a Hybrid Boot setup where you can boot Tinycore within Windows and also normally from BIOS (to gain the best performance). Paragon Ext2Browser (read & write) is used to allow you to copy files in and out of Tinycore (from within Windows).
::STEPS:: Part A
VBoxManage internalcommands createrawvmdk -filename PhysicalDrive0-Partition2.vmdk -rawdisk \\.\PhysicalDrive0 -partitions 2 -mbr C:\grub.mbr -register
(grub.mbr here is an empty “notepad” file we created.) (Win Vista: console/cmd with Administrator access is required for this step) Read more on VBoxManagePart B Note: This part requires understanding of the Official TC Install Guide. All steps are exactly the same as the official install guide, except you are doing it from Windows through the VM. The partition does not need the bootable flag, thus you can skip the whole part regarding cfdisk. For beginners, it would be good to follow along the nice screenshots in the official guide.
mkfs.ext3 /dev/sda2
kernel /boot/bzImage quiet xvesa=800x600x24
so when it runs in a window it fits on the screen. The vga option only affects the terminal.dd if=/dev/sda2 of=/home/tc/grub.mbr bs=512 count=1
.Part C
If you have a problem with mouse pointer try to uncheck System' → 'Motherboard' → 'Enable absolute pointing device' in the VM configuration (tested on VirtualBox-4.2). As an alternative you can install Xorg-7.6 and virtualbox-ose-additions in order to sync your mouse pointer between host machine and VM properly.