So I installed tinycore on a 32 mb flash drive using unetbootin a little while ago. I tried booting into it and the unetbooting screen appeared. I selected tinycore and everything booted fine. I installed a few things like perl and links, and continued on. When I booted into it again, none of these programs were retained. What can I do about this in order for the programs to be retained after each shutdown?
I can't tell without seeing your system, but I suspect that you're actually operating inside an initramfs RAMdisk. It populates the RAMdisk from file when it loads, then otherwise ignores it. To get things added to that, you need to update that file.
here is as much information as I have on initrd. Be careful when working with yours, you could easily make a system unbootable by building it wrong or not having the correct permissions on things.