Good Morning from my Robotics Lab! This is Shadow_8472, and today, I am finishing off the year with another entry into my Raspberry Pi operating system collection. Let’s get started!<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I have a number of Pi projects going around now, and not enough Pi’s equipment for everything. My Pi 4 is mainly serving as the family’s entertainment system (I happened to find a Steam Controller driver for it), and my Pi 400 –which I originally intended for that job– is running my Raspian reverse Wi-Fi router card because it’s not supported yet by LibreELEC outside beta releases. I’m tossing these microSD cards around like playthings, and my family has expressed mild concern.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
But today, I am taking notes as I build a side project to help with my Photo Trunk project. I have no idea if it’s going to work well, but I’m hoping! Worst case is I learn a few things and move to something more appropriate.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I’ve covered Tiny\/Micro Core Linux before. I know it’s very much a build-your-own experience type of distro without being totally unapproachable for beginners intent on learning. I am installing it using BlinkiePie (Pi 3B+) with the intention of moving it to a Pi 4 unit later.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The two documents on the download page, IMPORTANT and README, explain how to install the operating system to an SD card and expand the second partition. I followed along more or less blindly.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
At one point, fdisk<\/em> is opened, and I was instructed to “write down the starting and ending sectors of the second partition.” [source<\/a>] When I listed them, fdisk<\/em> reported StartCHS, EndCHS, StartLBA, and EndLBA. I looked, but I wasn’t able to find any other examples of fdisk<\/em> reporting in this way. I only learned about “Cylinder Head Sector” and “Logical Block Addressing” by separating the acronyms. I proceeded to make a new partition, and fdisk<\/em> was nice enough to mention the largest size I could go.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I was expecting to start with something resembling the larger “Tiny” Core variant with a desktop environment, but PiCore only has a “Micro” Core image available. GIMP is very much a textbook GUI program, but the tce package manager was more than happy to install it and I estimate fifty dependencies.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I browsed over to the TinyCore forums, and was actually able to activate my account. The connection still isn’t secure, so don’t go using any personal standardized passwords. 50-99 alphanumeric characters with symbols say that’s not an attack vector against me though.<\/p>\n\n\n\nConstruction Pains<\/h2>\n\n\n\n