Installing Alpine on HDD overwriting everything

From Alpine Linux
Revision as of 18:59, 2 March 2011 by Bess (talk | contribs) (corrected wiki tags)

Installing Alpine to a new machine, overwriting everything on the harddisk

Warning: This will erase everything on your machine's harddisk. Don't blame me if someone sues you for this, your cat dies etc. You are warned.


The following is meant to be an absolute newbie guide

  • Burn the alpine iso image to a CD
  • Put the CD into the new computer and turn on the power.
  • Wait for the text "login:" to appear, type "root" and press enter.
  • Run the "setup-alpine" script to choose your keyboard, network and password options.
Note: If you run setup-disk before setup-alpine, the setup-alpine script won't be available to you when you reboot.
  • Update your repositories

vi /etc/repositories

 http://dl-3.alpinelinux.org/alpine/v2.1/main
  • Make sure the respository is working by typing in

apk update

Note: The version needs to match the version you are installing, this is done so that the setup-disk command below can download fdisk if you are using the minimal install CD
  • Type "setup-disk" and press enter.
  • You will be asked where to install. If you don't understand the question, press y and enter.

The system is now installed and after a while you will see a message saying "Please reboot"

Type "reboot" and press enter. You can remove the CD now, since the system is installed. Your system is ready. You can have fries with that, although there are healthier alternatives.

Note: Since you are installing to harddisk, there is no need to use the Alpine local backup system

Continue Setting up your Computer