26 january 2020
I got piCore Linux (the Raspberry Pi fork of TinyCore Linux) running on my Raspberry pi 3B+ this past week. TinyCore is interesting. Everything is run from RAM. This makes it boot really fast and also reduces the writes that are done to the SD card (good because SD cards don't have as many write cycles as hard drives or SSDs). My goal in setting this up was to run a gopher hole from my house. I've succeeded in this goal. It's not accessible from the public net just yet but it's all working locally.
I'm running gophernicus as the gopher server. This is a very popular and powerful gopher server software. Turns out it's not available as a pre-built package for TinyCore Linux yet, though. I had to compile it from source and figure out all the config options necesary for TinyCore to start the thing up at boot. Well, I've figured all of that out and decided it would be really nice of me to provide the extension to other piCore users. I've packaged up what I've put together and will be submitting the package upstream. Guess I'm a piCore extension maintainer now...
This post is a promise to both get the server on the public net soon and also to actually get the gophernicus extension published. If I don't have a follow up post sometime in the next few weeks and you're reading this. You should email me and shame me for not following through on this promise ;)