That sounds very useful! Do you have a writeup or any tips to set that up?

Please details!

How can I put an image in /boot and load and run it from GRUB?

I'm away from my PCs at the moment, but if you already have a Linux distro installed then you should be able to edit grub.cfg, copy the existing entry for your distro, and punch in TCL's vmlinuz+initrd.

Once I'm back home I'll put up a fuller write-up.

>you should be able to edit grub.cfg

You mean the grub configuration file that shouldn't be edited?

#

# DO NOT EDIT THIS FILE

#

# It is automatically generated by /usr/sbin/grub-mkconfig using templates

# from /etc/grub.d and settings from /etc/default/grub

#

It is a pet peeve of mine, but according to the good people that wrote GRUB2, grub.cfg is subject to auto-magic modifications when updating the (main) Linux install, so it shouldn't be edited manually but rather sort of scripted.

For a GRUB2 installed to harddisk, modifications should be written to

40_Custom

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Grub2/CustomMenus

otherwise (it depends on which Linux distro is the "main" one) it can happen that at next update the grub.cfg is recreated losing your changes to it.

Right, that's totally what I meant; I totally don't just ignore that warning and reapply my patch if I ever accidentally run grub-mkconfig after initial install ;)

In any case, something to the effect of

    root (hd0,1)
    kernel /tinycore/vmlinuz tce=sda1/tinycore/tce vga=794
    initrd /tinycore/core.gz

in GRUB's shell should do the trick no matter what might lurk in grub.cfg.

Yep. :)

And (as a side note) one could make a separate, static .cfg, let's say tiny.cfg and load it from shell with configfile, aka configfile /tiny.cfg.

you know, that's a really clever idea

Right? It sure saved my ass more than once.