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packages

The base of Tiny Core Linux (TCL) is, as the name implies, kept small.

Instead, extra software is loaded through the use of TCE extensions.

tce-load

Command tce-load can be used to load packages, see also tce-ab.

$ tce-load -h
Usage: tce-load [ -i -w -wi -wo -wil -ic -wic -wicl]{s} extensions
  -i   Loads local extension
  -w   Download extension only
  -wi  Download and install extension
  -wo  Download and create an ondemand item
  Adding -c to any -i option will force a one time copy to file system
  Adding -l to any -i option indicates load only - do not update onboot or ondemand
  Adding -s to any option will suppress OK message used by apps GUI
...
$ tce-ab
tce-ab - Tiny Core Extension: Application Browser

S)earch P)rovides K)eywords or Q)uit:

Both programs are shell scripts, so fairly simple and understandable.

TCE directory

Besides boot, the other directory on a Tiny Core Linux disk is tce.

Applications are stored locally in a "tce" directory on a persistent store.

Typical contents are "onboot.lst", a list of extensions to load at boot.

And an "optional" directory, that contains TCZ extensions / packages.

TCZ packages

The TCZ packages, with a .tcz suffix, are gzip-compressed squashfs images.

If one had to put it in a single sentence, TCZ could be described as "a loop-mounted squashfs 4.x archive, with specified parameters, usually symlinked into the main file system".

They are created from a directory with the contents, using mksquashfs tool:.

mksquashfs /tmp/myextension myextension.tcz

Note: on other distributions, the parameters -b 4k -no-xattrs are needed.

They are normally mounted, but can be unpacked with the unsquashfs tool:

unsquashfs myextension.tcz

This will create a new squashfs-root directory, with the package contents.

Meta-data files

Alongside a typical extension there are a set of meta-data files.

Unlike the popular deb and rpm formats, the meta-data is not kept inside the archive itself. This allows meta-data updates without changing the main archive, which may be several hundred megabytes large.

The accompanying files are:

  • .md5.txt: checksum (see: md5sum -c)
  • .dep: direct dependencies
  • .info: size, license, author, updates, and usage information
  • .list: file list
  • .tree: recursive list of dependencies
  • .zsync: used for delta updates

References