Tiny Core Plus Linux GRUB2 menuentry

For a super-duper lightweight Linux distro, I think this one takes the cake! Tiny Core Linux has 3 different cores to choose from: Core (16MB), Tiny Core (21MB), Core Plus (163MB). After testing them out, I decided to go for the 163MB installation image.

Core and Tiny Core are too basic for my taste. With Core booting into command line mode, while Tiny Core didn’t have much stuff to play around with. Even with Tiny Core Plus, I still found it to be quite bare. Anyway, with my super-multi boot PC installation, I have way too many distros to play around!

I have here two GRUB2 menuentry versions.

The first version I have the entire content extracted from the ISO file and copied into a folder which I name it as "tce". Depending where your partition is located, replace "X" with the partition number. hd0 refers to the 1st hard disk in your PC.

menuentry 'Tiny Core Plus 11.1 (2020) (hd0,X /dev/sdaX)' {
    set root='hd0,X'
    echo 'vmlinuz booting ...'
    linux /tce/boot/vmlinuz
    echo 'initrd the core.gz! ...'
    initrd /tce/boot/core.gz
}

For the second GRUB2 menuentry, I use the ISO version to startup Tiny Core Plus. Booting off an ISO file will get you a live version of the Tiny Core Plus. It took me a while to gather the information from some forum and modified it until it worked. For this setup, copy the tiny core plus ISO to the root folder of the partition. The Tiny Core Plus version that I am using is version 11.1. It should technically work for other versions. Just make sure the ISO name matches the GRUB2 menuentry.

menuentry 'Tiny Core Plus 11.1 (2020) ISO (hd0,X /dev/sdaX)' {
    echo 'setting up isofile ...'
    set isofile='CorePlus-v11.1-2020.iso'
    echo 'setting up loopback'
    loopback loop (hd0,msdosX)/${isofile}
    echo 'booting vmlinuz ...'
    linux (loop)/boot/vmlinuz iso=/mnt/sdaX/${isofile} cde
    echo 'initrd the core.gz! ...'
    initrd (loop)/boot/core.gz
}

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