Installling Tiny Core OS on USB Drive

Wanted to experiment with a new operating system so I decided to give Tiny Core a try. It is an operating system that is only about 12 MB in size and should easily fit in a USB drive.

Here is the steps I went through using Windows 7.

• Download the Tiny Core 12 MB .iso file from  http://distro.ibiblio.org/tinycorelinux/downloads.html
• Download core2usb from  http://sourceforge.net/projects/core2usb/. This program will help install Tiny Core on your USB drive. You have to format your USB drive first. (right-click on it and select format and choose FAT32 for the file system and put a check box on quick format).
• I then ran core2usb. Below is a screenshot of the program.

• First, browse to the directory where you downloaded your Tiny Core .iso file. 
• Make sure that you double-click on the USB drive that you just formatted. Be sure that this is the correct drive letter for the USB drive. If it is a valid drive, the INSTALL button will no longer be grayed-out. The status line to the left of the INSTALL button should indicate whether or not the installation was successful.
• Reboot your system, then go into BIOS, usually by pressing DEL just when the computer is starting up. Look for options to boot from the USB and make sure these are enabled. BIOS differ from one computer manufacturer to another so you'll have to explore your own BIOS options. If you have an old machine, then booting from the USB may not be an available option at all and this guide would have been pointless for you.
• If you are sure that you can now boot from the USB drive, choose that option the next time your computer restarts. You should then be able to see a DOS like screen with several options for Tiny Core. Just choose the default option. Wait through a few more DOS like screens, and you should be able to see the desktop below.

  

The next challenge is connecting to the Internet to get all the applications (which Tiny Core calls extensions) from sites like  http://distro.ibiblio.org/tinycorelinux/tcz.html

Unfortunately, I can't seem to get my Internet connection up and running while I'm using Tiny Core since it requires several extensions which I need to install. But installing these seems to be difficult without a good background on Linux commands and on using the vi editor.

But if the Internet connection was up and running, I would imagine installing additional applications would be as simple as adding extensions to Google Chrome or add-ons to Firefox.

Hope this guide was useful in some way.