14 DAY TRIAL // Robert Shingledecker has announced the immediate availability for download and testing of the Tiny Core 5.3 RC1 Linux operating system, one of the smallest full operating systems in the world.
As the name implies, this distribution is known for its small size and versatility. The developer integrates a large number of packages and an attractive desktop. Now, there are many small Linux distributions out there, and a lot of them are smaller than Tiny Core.
The advantage of Tiny Core is that it actually comes with desktop, quite a few apps, and a limited functionality out of the box. It's the smallest in comparison with other full-featured operating systems, not with a simple CLI (command line interface) version.
“Our goal is the creation of a nomadic ultra small graphical desktop operating system capable of booting from cdrom, pendrive, or frugally from a hard drive. The desktop boots extremely fast and is able to support additional applications and hardware of the users choice. While Tiny Core always resides in ram, additional applications extensions can either reside in ram, mounted from a persistent storage device, or installed into a persistent storage device,” reads the official website.
Robert Shingledecker is actually responsible for the release of three different versions: Core (provides only a command line interface and is recommended only for experienced users), TinyCore (includes the base Core system plus X/GUI extensions for a dynamic FLTK/FLWM graphical desktop environment), and CorePlus (an installation image and not the distribution, includes the base Core System and installation tools).
The Tiny Core 5.3 RC1 Linux operating system weighs only 14.7 MB and it's one of the most advanced versions released so far. Even if it's still in development, the OS is quite stable, but you shouldn't use it as such.
According to the changelog, an error that was displayed when an extension contained multiple modules has been fixed, the owner /tmp/tce/optional has been changed in order to provide support for tftplist, sudo must now be used when unmounting meta-extensions, the ntpd boot option has been removed, full path to sudo commands is now available, a new ntpserver boot option has been added, and sudo call has been fixed.
A complete list of updates and changes can be found in the official announcement. Download Tiny Core Linux 5.2 RC3 right now from Softpedia. Remember that this is a development version and it should NOT be installed on production machines. It is intended for testing purposes only.