antiX to the rescue

 Working with Tiny Core, especially the Debian compatible version, dCore, was a bust. But I learned things in the process: issues in Grub and how device mounting actually works in Linux are two that come to mind.

Also, in trying to figure out something to do with it, I came up with how nice it would be to have a USB stick that loads the OS into RAM,leaving the rest of the stick for storage. I have a few older computers that still have HDD memory, we're talking hundreds of GBs, and if I can run everything from RAM and USB, I can imagine I can extend the life of the HDDs by reducing the write cycles to only times I am storing back ups. Trying to implement this was a nightmare using dCore Linux, but turned out to be trivially easy with antiX, with a GUI wizard called Live USB Maker.

After that I realized it would be good to have a stick I could take out after the OS has been loaded, to have an extremely secure session for situations like getting on public WiFi. Furthermore, this would increase the life of the stick, as it would only be doing reads after the initial burning. Well, Tiny Core is probably up to this task, but I am sticking to antiX. So on one stick I figured out the apps and configurations I would like, and then I used another GUI tool, Snapshot, to compress all that down and make it into an ISO. Then I used Live USB Maker to make another stick, but I could have just used dd as I didn't need or want any of persistence features for this use case.

I learned less, but actually got things done.