How to get regular stuff working

Alpine comes with busybox by default. Busybox is set up as an endpoint for numerous symlinks that substitute various utilities. Since busybox tries to be a minimalistic package, the busybox commands may still be missing some functionality.

To replace the busybox symlinks, you can install the relevant packages:

Basic utilities

Main article: GNU core utilities

Very basic utilities ranging from cd, ls, lsblk, grep, are all busybox symlinks by default. To have the complete packages:

# apk add util-linux coreutils grep findutils

Bash shell

Main article: Change default shell

The default shell used by Alpine Linux is the busybox variant of the ash shell. To install bash:

# apk add bash bash-completion

Hardware Management

Install pciutils and usbutils for configuring PCI and USB hardware respectively. You can always remove these packages once the hardware is configured.

# apk add pciutils usbutils

The packages hwdata-pci and hwdata-usb are dependencies for the above utilities and they are installed automatically.

Disk Management

Managing (removable) disks is much easier with udisks.

# apk add udisks2

To see the mounted disks:

# udisksctl status

Network Management

For network, you may want to install iproute2.

# apk add iproute2

Development environment

Compiling in Alpine may be more challenging because it uses musl-libc instead of glibc. Alpine offers the regular compiler stuff such as gcc.

# apk add gcc

The alpine-sdk meta package is provided to build packages for Alpine. It includes abuild, build-base, and git.

# apk add alpine-sdk

To install CMake:

# apk add cmake extra-cmake-modules

ccache and a lot other tools are also available in Alpine.

Functional differences between musl and glibc