Good Morning from my Robotics Lab! This is Shadow_8472, and today, I am once again writing well ahead of the actual publication date. Let’s get started!
As I start this post, I’m still in week 2, and I might even finish this segment in week 2, depending on where a good stopping point is. The following events started early in week 2.
Last week’s post covered installing Micro Core, all the way up to and including a corrupt install of Java. I’m discouraged. I was just one… three… several steps away from finishing this project within my projected timespan of two weeks. I want this server up, but it’s more important to finish correctly. But timetables are near-impossible to stick to when you’re also learning how to use a computer again as if for the first time.
The command line is very different to using a GUI. It’s not toddler friendly, and it requires a ton of memorization. File systems, commands, command flags, file names; during one of my Third Workshop visits, I learned the man command, which brings up a manual for most commands. Micro Core has external documentation, likely for space concerns, so it’s off to the Internet for pretty much anything I don’t get.
Botching the Java install made a big, old mess, and having two copies of the Minecraft jar file made it more awkward when an obsolete backup got involved. I made the decision to nuke the OS and start over. But I didn’t want to just cut it off right there. If I need to start all over, possibly several times, I’m going to want to keep at least some of my progress, after all, I have SSH access from no fewer than three machines, all nicely set up with each one’s public key.
I took it under advisement to start writing a script to rapidly move back in case I need to redo my setup several times. Even if I never use it though, I’ve still learned a lot by dissecting my own work.
For starters, I spent an afternoon and early evening working at a trickle, writing down elements I needed to save. I moved them all to a thumb drive located at /mnt/sdc1, and found I had lost all my progress when I got home and plugged everything in. At least I have a picture of the tiny whiteboard I was taking notes on.
Mastering persistence is one of the greatest and most important challenges to working with the Tiny Core family, alongside finding someone who knows how to do the thing you’re trying to do in a close enough circumstance. With most available documentation aimed at baseline computer-literate GUI users, a GUI native lost in a CLI world has to sift through multiple forums and documents to find relevant answers. If I had to guess, I’d say it feels like a quarter of the Tiny Core help out there talks you through different menus of the default programs while maybe one out of sixteen is a Micro Core specific way of doing things. Note: I think it’s actually closer to one out of eight GUI special tutorials.
Investigating persistence, I learned a lot about the file structure: too much to regurgitate for review here all at once. I’m not even sure it’s even fully digested. The root file directory has a bunch of files, each with an intended purpose. When I reinstall Java, it’s going in /opt, for example. TCL has a special directory called tce where all the packages go for reinstalling everything on bootup. There’s also some network of links I haven’t even begun to explore; I just know they make it possible to pull off running the OS from a couple different files instead of having everything scattered everywhere.
Vanishing files had me for at least a couple days in parallel with other issues. I read that writing files to physical drives makes them persistent by nature. After my work went poof from my USB stick, I toyed with the umount command a bit more. Nothing worked. Eventually, I came across someone on a Discord server who gave me a working example, and made a whole day feel almost worthwhile. I was able to correctly mount my USB drive and edit its actual contents instead of filling a bubble in RAM somewhere to be flushed out when the power goes out.
Sometimes, I don’t even know if something is a general Linux question. My file system has both sda and sda1 as valid directories to look through, even though I have an sdb1 and so on, but no plain sdb, or a plain sdc when I plug a thumb drive in. This one, I don’t know for sure yet, but I think it has something to do with a bad bootcode, where I referenced sda. Now it’s in my fstab (file system table) file and it shows up every time I boot.
Things are all messed up. I just need to nuke it and start over.
Final question: Working with Micro Core has been fun so far, in the same way a video game can be fun, even if it’s super difficult, provided the rules stay the same the whole time. I can constantly feel success in my fingertips, only for the next challenge to pop up over the horizon. Have you ever applied skills you learned while at play in a more serious situation?