How to get regular stuff working
Man pages
A "man" command and basic manual pages can be installed with:
apk add mandoc man-pages
The appropos command may be installed with:
apk add mandoc-apropos
The man-pages package only provides the system's core manual pages. Other packages come with their separate *-doc sub-packages that ship their documentation (which may include man pages). This is the Alpine Way to allow for the small default footprint. For example:
$ apk add curl $ man curl man: No entry for curl in the manual. $ apropos curl | wc -l 0 After adding curl, there are no man pages $ apk add curl-doc (1/1) Installing curl-doc (7.52.1-r2) Executing mandoc-apropos-1.13.3-r6.trigger OK: 60 MiB in 31 packages $ apropos curl | wc -l 366 Now, with curl-doc installed, there's a boatload of pages!
If you would like all the documentation packages pertaining to your installed packages to be pulled in automatically, you may install the docs
meta package.
apk add docs
Basic commands and shell hints
Alpine comes with busybox by default. And busybox is set up as an endpoint for numerous symlinks that substitute various utilities. Though busybox is not that bad, the busybox replacement commands may still be missing some functionality.
To replace the symlinks to busybox, install...
- Shell utilities (things like grep, awk, ls are all busybox symlinks)
apk add util-linux pciutils usbutils coreutils binutils findutils grep
- Bash
It's also easy enough to have bash itself installed:
apk add bash bash-doc bash-completion
and to possibly change the login shell with chsh.
- Funny characters at the console
Edit the file at /etc/rc.conf and change line 92 to:
unicode="YES"
Disk Management
Disk management is so much easier with udisks or udisks2
Installation
apk add udisks2 udisks2-doc
See the mounted disks
udisksctl status
Compiling : a few notes and a reminder
Compiling in Alpine may be more challenging because it uses musl-libc instead of glibc. Please review 'The functional differences with glibc' if you think of porting packages or just for the sake of knowing, of course.
Alpine offers the regular compiler stuff like gcc and cmake ... possible others
(unvalidated) apk packages to install so one can start building software
apk add build-base gcc abuild binutils binutils-doc gcc-doc
a complete install for cmake looks like
apk add cmake cmake-doc extra-cmake-modules extra-cmake-modules-doc
ccache is also available
apk add ccache ccache-doc