My Tinycore Ports Tree

This repo contains the tree that I use to build my TinyCore extensions. The extensions generated by the shell scripts included in this repository are not prepared for validation by the TinyCore tree and are only useful for personal use.

This tree is being useful for me and I put it on GitHub in the hope that will be useful for others.

How to use it

You must load the "compiletc.tcz" extension to have a working compiler and the "squashfs-tools". You can do this with the "environment.sh" script in the main directory:

tc@box:/mnt/sdc1/Work/ExtBuild$ sh environment.sh
... bla bla ...

You must execute the "compile.sh" script in the directory corresponding to the extension that you want to build. You must not have super-user permission as guest permission are sufficient.

Many scripts assume that you already have downloaded the archive file for the application. In this case you find a "getit.sh" script that will download from Internet the appropriate source files.

Let's do an exercise: we will compile together the Emacs extension.

First of all you must "cd" to the "emacs" directory and execute the "getit.sh" script.

tc@box:/mnt/sdc1/Work/ExtBuild/emacs$ sh getit.sh
Connecting to ftp.gnu.org (208.118.235.20:80)

Now we start the compiling process:

tc@box:/mnt/sdc1/Work/ExtBuild/emacs$ sh compile.sh
<clunk clunk clank clonk....>

Whoa! I think you have compiled the "emacs.tcz" extension and you are ready to load it with:

tc@box:/mnt/sdc1/Work/ExtBuild/emacs$ tce-load -i emacs

Frequently asked questions

Q1) Wait... you are building really big extensions. This is opposite to the spirit of TinyCore! Why are you doing this mess?

R1) I'm a developer and I really like building my software. I like to read the header files and to study how to executables are linked. To me it's not relevant to have the "dev" package isolated from the main one. I always need headers and symbols in the executables.

The extensions generated by these build scripts are not useful for submission to the tiny core distribution as they contains really big executables (not stripped) and every package have the headers file which are only useful if you want to compile your software against this build.

Q2) Why you don't submit these extensions to the TinyCore team?

R2) See R1

Acknowledgement

Thanks to all the wonderful TinyCore team! They have built a really good distro that deserve more attention.