This repository provides Makefile-based tools to create customized TinyCore images aka appliances.

Folders

This repositories contains the following subdirectories:

• appliances: contains the build instruction of your appliances
• mk: contains the Makefile-based tools download, iso and dependencies
• downloads: default download directory for official iso and tcz files
• share: contains instructions for building custom initramfs or tcz files
• archive: contains static archives

Usage

To build an appliance for which build instruction already exist, simply run:

make app/<name>

Here, <name> refers to the subdirectory in ./appliances/ which must contain an iso.mk file containing the instructions. After a successful build, you will find the resulting iso image under ./build/<name>.iso.

The iso.mk file solely contains a few variable definitions that are used by the tools in ./mk/ to assemble the iso image. E.g.:

BASE_ISO       := Core-11.1.iso
CORE_GZ        := 11.1/tinycore-novboxguest.gz
EXTRA_INITRDS  := 11.1/vboxga5244.gz
APPS(DOWNLOAD) := 11.x/Xorg-7.7 \
                  11.x/pavucontrol
APPS(ARCHIVE)  := i3 \
                  firefox
APPS(SHARE)    := 11.x/audio-vbox \
                  11.x/uvcvideo

BASE_ISO and CORE_GZ are mandatory. The former specifies what official TinyCore image shall be used as a basis whereas the latter explicitly states what initramfs is used. The core.gz file of the base iso will thus be replaced with the specified file. You can specify an arbitrary number of additional initramfs files in EXTRA_INITRDS. In the example above, we take a slightly modified initramfs from the TinyCore iso in which we removed the vboxguest kernel module and add a second initramfs containing the VirtualBox Guest Additions. The build instructions for files referenced by CORE_GZ and EXTRA_INITRDS are found in ./share/.

The variables APPS(DOWNLOAD), APPS(ARCHIVE) and APPS(SHARE) specify what packages (tcz) shall be loaded on startup. The packages are searched/built in ./downloads/, ./archive/ or ./share/ respectively. Package dependencies are automatically resolved, downloaded and included in the iso.

In addition to the definitions in iso.mk, one can add a folder mydata. The entire files and folder structure beneath mydata will be packaged into a mydata.tgz file that will be copied onto the root file system by TinyCore on startup.