Windows Anonymous

This is getting nuts.

Once again, I started out with the idea of reviewing two separate distros only to discover (again) that they're both micro, or mini, or whatever. TinyCore was reviewed in one of my previous micro-distro comparisons; that was version 2.3 and it acquitted itself well. This time we have version 2.8 and I thought it was as good a time as any to see what's new and exciting with it. In addition we have Android-x86, which I wanted to do in the previous Micro-Distros installment but I couldn't get it installed/configured in time and still finish a paper I had to do for school.

I'm not like certain people in certain urban areas of the United States who have 5 different cell phones. I have my Blackberry and it does what I need it to do. I do have a netbook, but it already has Linux on it. With that in mind, I was mildly interested in getting a copy of Android once it was ported to x86. For this article I got the version 2.0 liveCD from CVS. Install was, not surprisingly, fast--like seconds. Using it, on the other hand, took some getting used to...until I approached it like a cell phone instead of a computer, after which I was good to go. Closing windows required the ESC key acting a lot like the Back arrow in a file- or web-browser. I also had to break from tradition and do the networking DHCP instead of bridged in VirtualBox, since it's not set up to run through a router. No matter, once up it worked fine with VBox's NAT. The version I got was an OEM-specific build--in this case for the Asus EeePC--so it went looking for an absent nForce chipset. Graphics, as a result, were somewhat stuttery; with the right setup I'm sure that would go away. The footprint is, again not surprisingly, small: the entire installed disk image clocked in at 394MB. This was obviously a consideration when netbooks first became the must-have toy, since netbook makers had to keep their profit margins for Linux-based netbooks close to their Windows counterparts and so choked them with 8GB SSDs instead of the 160GB SATA drives that the Windows machines got, in addition to getting the RAM cut in half. Can you say, "Microsoft tax"?

The applications (in the App Store) are the same ones available pretty much everywhere else; the list is a fairly healthy size and growing. Something to keep in mind, however, is that this is kind of a one-trick pony; it was originally designed for and targeted at cell phones, and you will see references to that throughout the x86 version. That said, it could be good for bringing an old laptop back to life; if chipset compatibility and other potential hardware issues don't get in the way, I see it being a nice alternative to throwing Ex-Pee onto that IBM ThinkPad you paid too much for 9 years ago. We're only at 2.0, and being the first OS to go from the cell phone to the PC instead of the other way around (and open source FTW), there's good things on the horizon.

As previously mentioned, TinyCore survived a previous visit to my overclocked VBox tower of terror and is currently updated by .5 versions. Read up on that article here, because the way TinyCore does things is a little different than most Linux installs and they haven't changed anything in that regard. Remember that TinyCore lives up to its name by taking up all of 10 frizzickin' megabytes on the iso and can run in RAM, to the tune of 128 MB. The applications that you can install here are actually extensions of the core OS; of course you can alwyas compile your own, as all the usual GNU tools are available. Persistence is, like many other live images, available when booting from USB. The idea here is extreme portability; you can configure a USB install to run on various types of hardware and have it act as your own personal skeleton key (for machines which are capable of booting from USB; remember that not all boxes can do that yet). This is your custom router OS with no need for a big loud hard drive; grab an old Dell Craptiplex (because let's face it, they're not much good for anything else) and stuff a few Gig-E cards into it...Viola, instant router with all functions and control at your disposal.

All of the changes here are under the hood unless you count FLWM, and even that looks the same. Most of the changes are functionally related to TC's package management; tce-setup, tce-load, and tce-update get updated, as did appsaudit, which now allows selective updating and deletion. All is not flawless however; Chromium brought it to a screeching halt.

Like the first 2 micro-distro writeups, this was not, and is not, a competition, especially in this particular case where the distros themselves are aimed at different niche markets entirely. It just so happens that those paths intersected here, and they could both be used for similar purposes by the enterprising (or someone who is simply capable of thinking outside the box). They take almost no time to download, so grab 'em and fire up that old computer sitting in your closet.

Tiny Core: http://tinycorelinux.com/ Android: http://www.android-x86.org/