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