This is possibly the smallest OS you can install on the raspberry pi, Tiny Core, weighing in just about 70mb this OS is not only small but it is also fast! Since the design of the OS is meant to be ran off the RAM you will no longer have the bottle neck of the SD card. In this guild I will show you how to install this on the Raspberry Pi Zero W along with setting up the WIFI and GUI.

Equipment List

Raspberry Pi Zero W ► Amazon | Ebay

Software List

Tiny Core Linux ► http://www.tinycorelinux.net

Etcher ► https://etcher.io/

Links

Tiny Core Forums ► http://forum.tinycorelinux.net

Tiny Core Install

Step 1: Install Tiny Core

Download the Image from http://www.tinycorelinux.net/downloads -> ports -> other ports -> raspberry pi stable

You can download the wireless modules from here

Download Now!
or manually download them from tinycore servers using this command

for pkg in ca-certificates libiw libnl ncurses openssl readline wifi wireless-4.9.22-piCore wireless_tools wpa_supplicant firmware-rpi3-wireless; do for f in $pkg.tcz{,.dep,.info,.list,.md5.txt,.tree,.zsync}; do wget http://ftp.nluug.nl/os/Linux/distr/tinycorelinux/9.x/armv6/tcz/$f; done; done

load the files on to the piCore sdcard (remember to delete the kernel7 to make space for modules)

no we are ready to boot from sd card.

Expanding file system

To expand the file system we first need to delete the 2nd partition and recreate using the max amount of space

Step 1

$sudo fdisk -u /dev/mmcblk0

from here type p to list partitions and not the start size of partition 2

now we can delete the partition with d and recreate it with n.

create partition 2 then enter the start sector.

hit enter again to use default last sector.

now type w to write to disk

we now need to reboot

Step 2

Now that we told the OS the largest size possible for partition 2, we need to resize the filesystem so it can be used with the command below

$sudo resize2fs /dev/mmcblk0p2

you are now done. to test type

$du -h

this should list the size of mmcblk0p2

Installing Wifi Modules

With the file we have downloaded earlier from out PC, we now need to copy those file over to our partition 2.

Step 1

To start we need to mount partition 1, which we commonly know as /boot and copy the file for the wireless modules.

$sudo mount /dev/mmcblk0p1 /mnt/mmcblk0p1
$cp /mnt/mmcblk0p1 /mnt/mmcblk0p2/tce/optional

now that everything is copied over we need to add it to the onboot.lst file so it will load the modules on every boot

$echo "firmware-rpi3-wireless.tcz" >> /mnt/mmcblk0p2/tce/onboot.lst
$echo "wifi.tcz" >> /mnt/mmcblk0p2/tce/onboot.lst

Step 2

to test everything you can simply type in these command in this order to load the modules manually

$tce-load -i firmware-rpi3-wireless
$tce-load -i wifi

to log in to a wifi network type

$sudo wifi.sh

Step 3

now that everything is tested and working, and logged in. we need to save these settings and make it persistent on reboot. to do this we need to type this command

$echo "wifi.sh -a" >> /opt/bootlocal.sh

and to save on reboot

$filetool.sh -b

Installing the Tiny Core GUI

This is probably the easiest step of them all. To install the GUI it’s 1 simple command

$tce-load -iw TC.tcz

this should only take a few mins. Once it’s done. you can either restart your device, or type

$startx

This is it!! check out the link to the forums if you are interested in getting more stuff working for the raspberry pi zero. thanks for the view

 

-don