How to get regular stuff working

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.

Disk Management

Managing (removable) disk is much easier with udisks or udisks2

Installation

  apk add udisks2 udisks2-doc

To 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