Raspberry Pi

From Alpine Linux

This tutorial will help you install Alpine Linux on your Raspberry Pi.

Preparation

This section will help you format and partition your SD card:

  1. Download Alpine for Raspberry Pi tarball which is named as alpine-rpi-<version>-armhf.rpi.tar.gz. You will need version 3.2.0 or greater if you have a Raspberry Pi 2.
  2. Mount your SD card to your workstation
  3. Use gnome-disks or fdisk to create a FAT32 partition. If you are using fdisk, the FAT32 partition is named as W95 FAT32 (LBA) and its ID is 0xC.
  4. Mark the newly created partition as bootable and save
  5. Mount the previously created partition
  6. Extract the tarball contents to your FAT32 partition
  7. Unmount the SD Card.

Installation

Alpine Linux will be installed as diskless mode, hence you need to use Alpine Local Backup (lbu) to save your modifications between reboots. Follow these steps to install Alpine Linux:

  1. Insert the SD Card into the Raspberry Pi and turn it on
  2. Login into the Alpine system
  3. Type setup-alpine
  4. Once the installation is complete, commit the changes by typing lbu commit

Reboot to verify that the installation was indeed successful.