Installation It means use as main system in physical machine, bare metal or embebed device. Unless Alpine Linux are most used inside docker and containers.. this document will described how Alpine Linux could be also put over a hardware to use as main operating system.

By example as do in smartphones by the PostmarketOS system (an operatiing system for smartphones based on Alpine Linux) or as Desktop over a computer like Adelie Linux. In fact, Alpine Linux are already installed in your media dumped, it means downloadble media files of Alpine Linux are already the system ready to use (live system) directly from the media where are dumped!

Quick Requirements

This is a simple and quick reference list, nowadays any hardware is supported for Alpine Linux:

At least 128 Megs of RAM for server without graphical GUI, or at least 1.6 Gigs for graphical desktop
At least 1 Gigs storage device for server without graphical GUI, or at least 10 Gigs for graphical desktop with web browsing

Highly recommended if you do not have great knowledge, to read wiki page for requirements: Requirements!

Installation Overview

If you have special or different requirements please check Installation Category wiki pages. More methods/architectures/devices (e.g. ARM, RPi, etc) are defined in Installation:_Use_cases wiki page.

1. Download the media source

Just grab from stable-release ISO image. Take note of architectures in green buttons.

2. Dump, burn or flash the image

Dump the ISO image onto a media source like USB/SD flashing; or CD/DVD/BR disk with burning software. For more detailed on this topic check Additional Details section

3. Boot and install process

Log-in as the user root with its initially empty password. Then execute the script called setup-alpine

Run `setup-alpine`

The setup-alpine script offers to configure pre-install setup and install process, here you can perform that questions and hit enter on each answer:

1. Keyboard map: Let you to perform the keyborad layout, this is really two cuestions:
- The first ante the general map: e.g. us or es
- And second the variant of e.g. us-nodeadkeys or es-winkeys respectively
2. Hostname this is the name of computer, mostly knowed as the human name, in Linux this are default to "localhost" if not configured.
3 Network (e.g. automatic DHCP IP address discovery)
4. DNS Servers
5. Timezone
6. Proxy ("None" for direct connections to the internet.)
7. SSH (Openssh is part of the default images.)
8. NTP (Chrony is part of the default images.)
9. Runtime Mode (Select between "diskless" (disk=none), "data" or "sys")

4. Rebooting to the new system

After the installation is completed, the system may be power-cycled or rebooted to confirm that everything is working.

If the configured runtime mode was "sys", then remove the initial installation media to boot the newly installed system.
If the configured runtime mode was "data", then keep installation media to boot the newly installed system.

The relevant commands for this are reboot or poweroff, after exits from setup-alpine process.

Additional Details

1. About Media download of image sources: Take note of the "architecture" namestring in each green button. Most common cases just download x86 or x86_64 types.. for further information check Architectures section and then Media Downloadable section of requirements wiki page. Optionally you can perform a sha256 checksum as described in Checksum section of Requirements wiki page but is not necessary in general cases.

2. About Media sources to dump image sources: This depends of your hardware, for some like ARM or PowerPC you could check Ways_to_install_Alpine_listed_by_architectures wiki page if you have special cases like ARM, PPC or s390 machines.

3. About boot install process: The boot process depends on each computer device, mostly need to specify wicht device to boot, for that check Booting section wiki page. Boot process copies the entire system into the RAM memory, and then runs it completely from RAM, so that the started command line environment does not depend on reading from the (slow) initial boot media anymore. After that a prompt for "login" are displayed, input the "root" as user and just enter. So there's no need to ask for password at first boot. Then the script called setup-alpine, can be used to configure the pre-install and installation, next section will explain each question.

4. About running mode of the media source: However, even though it is not installed on your device it is working as if it were, all the setup-scripts and the apk package manager are available to direct use, and all the general command line tools. All of this is from the media you boot, this mode is called "diskless mode", for further information check Setup_modes section for "alpine running modes". All the media Alpine images are already Alpine running live systems

Further Documentation

After the system has been installed, it has only placed the operating system, but things like internet browser or movie viewer are not yet installed, things like web server or mail server neither much less. For that you must check Tutorials_and_Howtos Post-Install section