Installing Tiny Core Linux on VirtualBox
Tiny Core Linux (TCL) is a very minimal Linux distribution which is blazingly fast. The Tiny Core Linux ISO is just under 12MB. It boots instantly and the entire core operating system is loaded into RAM making it extremely fast. Tiny Core Linux is based on Linux 2.6 kernel, Busybox, Tiny X, and Fltk. This article is step by step guide on installing Tiny Core Linux on VirtualBox. The steps given are very similar if you are installing TCL on a standalone server.
Download Tiny Core Linux from here. There are multiple ways in which you can install TCL. You can either download the MultiCore version which comes packaged with installer and network components. Alternately you can install the TinyCore version and then using AppBrowser you can download the Tiny Core installer to install TCL. In this example, I will use the second method since TinyCore ISO is considerably smaller than MultiCore version.
Create a new Linux virtual machine from VirtualBox. In the version field select "Other Linux". I recommend giving a RAM of 256MB and the virtual disk size of 1GB. In my installation, I use 500MB for swap space and the remaining 500MB for the primary ext4 partition where Tiny Core Linux is installed. Mount the downloaded Tiny Core Linux ISO (tinycore-current.iso) in virtual CD drive. If you are installing on a standalone machine, write the ISO to a boot CD. I used Tiny Core Linux 4.1 for this article.
Start the TCL virtual machine from VirtualBox. In the boot command prompt, press enter. Tiny Core Linux starts instantly and you are presented with the following screen,
Now we need to load TinyCore virtual CD in Tiny Core Linux. Click on the Mount icon at the bottom. Click on the CD device name to mount the CD (indicated by the green color). Now Tiny Core Linux ISO is available in the running instance of TCL.
Partitioning Hard disk for Tiny Core Linux Installation
Next step is to prepare the hard disk for installation of TCL. We will use the fdisk command to create the following partitions,
- /dev/sda1 – This will be the primary ext4 Linux partition where TCL is installed (500MB)
- /dev/sda2 – The Linux swap partition (500MB) From the bottom navigation bar, click on Aterm. From the terminal window change to super user mode,
sudo su
Now modify the partition table by running fdisk,
fdisk /dev/sda
- Create the primary partition by executing following fdisk commands,
We have given 70 cylinders out of 137 available for the new partition. This is around 500MB. you can alternatively give exact size by replacing 70 with +500M.
Now create the swap partition by executing the following fdisk commands,
Change the second partition to a swap partition by running the following commands,
Now write the change to the partition table running the write command,
You can verify the partitions by running the following command from the command prompt,
fdisk -l
Finally run the following command to prepare the swap partition,
mkswap /dev/sda2
Tiny Core Linux Installation (Version 4.1)
Tiny Core installation script is not part of the Tiny Core ISO. You need to download it from the central repository using the AppBrowser. Ensure that you have an active internet connection.
From the bottom menu, click on AppBrowser. From the AppBrowser click on Connect to access online TCL repository. Search for tc-install as shown below. Select tc-install and the bottom left option as "Download+Load" and click on Go.
The tc-install includes Perl5 and the total download size is around 14MB. Wait for the download to complete. Once download is complete right click on the desktop and select Applications => TC_Install.
Select the following options in the first screen of Tiny Core Linux installer. In order to select Tiny Core file, the ISO must be already mounted. Select the primary partition created using fdisk earlier.
Click on the right arrow. In the next screen select the formatting options as ext4. Click on the right arrow again. Now enter the boot options as given below,
tce=sda1 opt=sda1 home=sda1 norestore
Click on the right arrow. Review all the setting and then click on the proceed button in the next screen. Tiny Core Linux will be installed in a few seconds.
Shutdown TCL instance. Remove the Tiny Core Linux ISO from the virtual box settings and start the Tiny Core Linux. If everything goes well, Tiny Core Linux will boot from the hard disk. After installation, the size of the VirtualBox disk file was under 20MB!
You can verify the use of swap space by running the following command,
cat /proc/swaps
Installing Tomcat 7 on CentOS 6
CentOS is a stable Linux distribution suited for running web application servers such as Tomcat. CentOS shares the same code base as the commercial enterprise Linux from Red Hat (RHEL) and is widely used as a server Linux distribution. In this article, I will show you how easy it is to setup a Tomcat 7 web application server on a minimal CentOS 6 installation. Please note that I use 64-bit versions for the example here.
Getting Tomcat 7 up and running on CentOS 6 involves the following steps,
- Install CentOS 6
- Install Oracle Java Development Kit (JDK 1.6)
- Install Tomcat 7
- Configure CentOS 6 firewall for opening up Tomcat port
Install CentOS 6
I recommend installing the minimal ISO from the official repository. The minimal ISO (CentOS-6.0-x86_64-minimal.iso – 290MB) contains the bare minimum set of packages required for a CentOS system to get up and running. It also contains packages such as yum using which you can later add additional packages. Installing minimal ISO keeps the number of installed packages to a minimum there by increasing the overall security of the CentOS installation.
Download the ISO file, burn it to a CD and install it on your server machine.
Install Oracle Java Development Kit (JDK 1.6)
In order to install JDK, you either need an active internet connection from CentOS installation or you need to be able copy the JDK binary to the CentOS installation. Assuming you have Ethernet connection to your server, run the following command to get an IP address from DHCP server,
dhclient eth0
Run the ifconfig command to verify that you have an active Ethernet connection and an IP address allocated from the local LAN.
Now we need to install the wget package in CentOS which lets us download files from the command line. We will later use this command to download JDK and Tomcat binaries. Use the yum tool to download and install wget utility. Yum is part of the minimal CentOS install.
yum install wget
Now use the wget tool to download 64 bit RPM binaries for Oracle JDK 6.
wget http://download.oracle.com/otn-pub/java/jdk/6u29-b11/jdk-6u29-linux-x64-rpm.bin
Now you may be wondering how I got the URL for the RPM. Visit Oracle JDK download site and then click on download link for JDK 6. Accept the license agreement on the next page and then right click and copy the URL for the Linux x64 RPM. Obviously you need to get the URL from a different machine.
Now using the chmod command, change the downloaded file to an executable file,
chmod +x jdk-6u29-linux-x64-rpm.bin
Run the downloaded file to install Oracle JDK 6 on CentOS.
./jdk-6u29-linux-x64-rpm.bin
By default Java binaries are installed in /usr/java folder. Verify the Java installation by running the following command,
java -version
Install Tomcat 7
Installing Tomcat is similar to installing Java. Download the Tomcat 7 binary using the wget tool,
wget http://mirrors.gigenet.com/apache/tomcat/tomcat-7/v7.0.22/bin/apache-tomcat-7.0.22.tar.gz
You can find the URL for Tomcat 7 binary from the Tomcat 7 download page. Download the tar.gz version.
I prefer to install Tomcat on /usr/share folder. Move the downloaded binary to /usr/share folder,
mv apache-tomcat-7.0.22.tar.gz /usr/share/
Extract the Tomcat binaries using the following command,
tar -xzf apache-tomcat-7.0.22.tar.gz
To start Tomcat, go to the bin folder of Tomcat installation and then run the startup.sh script,
cd /usr/share/apache-tomcat-7.0.22/bin
./startup.sh
You can verify that tomcat is running by wget on the localhost. Note that by default tomcat listens on port 8080,
wget http://localhost:8080
If tomcat is running, wget will download the default page as index.html in the current folder.
You can access Tomcat from another machine by replacing the localhost by the actual IP address of your CentOS server. However initially I was unable to access Tomcat from another machine since by default CentOS firewall blocks port 8080.
Configure CentOS 6 firewall for opening up Tomcat port
Even the minimal install of CentOS has the firewall up and running. By default the firewall restricts access to various ports and that includes the default tomcat port 8080.
To open port 8080, we need to permanently change the iptables on CentOS. Edit the /etc/sysconfig/iptables file and add the following line to the top of the file,
-A INPUT -m state –state NEW -m tcp -p tcp –dport 8080 -j ACCEPT
You need to add this at the top of the file since iptables are processed from bottom to top. If you add the entry at the bottom, it may get overridden by an entry above.
For editing files, I use the vi tool which is available as part of CentOS minimal install. You can also install other editors such nano using the yum installer.
After making changes to the iptables file, restart the iptables service,
service iptables restart
The modified iptables file in my system,
Now you should be able to access the Tomcat 7 default page from another machine. If you still have problems double check that Tomcat 7 process is running,
ps -ef | grep tomcat
You should see a result containing tomcat as shown below,
Still having problems? Post them below!
How to install Adobe Acrobat Reader in Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic Koala)
Ubuntu by default comes with a document viewer which is capable of opening PDF files. However sometimes you may find that it doesn’t support some of the newer PDF files. If that happens you need to install latest Adobe Acrobat Reader which is freely available.
The only problem with Adobe reader is that it is a huge download at over 40MB and it requires about 150MB free space in your system!
How to install Adobe reader in Ubuntu 9.10?
Download Adobe reader from the official download page. This page redirects you to a page where you can download a file with extension .bin designed for linux systems. Copy this file to a folder of your choice.
Open a terminal window (Applications –> Accessories –> Terminal) and then navigate to the directory where the bin file is stored. In my case the name of the bin file is AdbeRdr9.2-1_i486linux_enu.bin. I have the file in /home/jayson/Downloads.
cd /home/jayson/Downloads
Change the permission of the bin file so that it can be executed.
chmod +x AdbeRdr9.2-1_i486linux_enu.bin
Now run the Adobe installer with admin privileges.
sudo ./AdbeRdr9.2-1_i486linux_enu.bin
This will start the installation. During installation it will ask for the installation directory. The default is /opt. Just press enter if you are ok with this folder. The following messages appear on the screen. If all goes well Adobe reader is installed on your Ubuntu system.
jayson@jjc:~/Downloads$ sudo ./AdbeRdr9.2-1_i486linux_enu.bin
[sudo] password for jayson:Extracting files, please wait. (This may take a while depending on the configuration of your machine)
This installation requires 145 MB of free disk space.
Enter installation directory for Adobe Reader 9.2 [/opt]
/optInstalling platform independent files … Done
Installing platform dependent files … Done
Setting up libraries … Done
Setting up desktop and menu icons … Done
Setting up the browser plugin … Donejayson@jjc:~/Downloads$
You can start Adobe reader from the Applications –> Office –> Adobe Reader 9 menu. Right click on the menu and click on “Add this launcher to panel” if you want this menu to appear on the top panel for easy access.
