Installation

From Alpine Linux




This page explains the basics to get started. But before actually installing, it can also help to skim through the Frequenty Asked Questions (FAQ).

Tip: This is a wiki!

If something isn't correct (anymore), or still incomplete, you will have to try figuring it out, or ask for the correct solution in the community.

And then carefully edit the wiki page.

Just as those before you did it, for you.


Minimal Hardware Requirements

  • At least 100 MB of RAM. [A graphical desktop system may require up to 1 GB minimum.]
  • At least 0-700 MB space on a writable storage device. [Only required in "sys" or "data" mode installations (explained below). It is optional in "diskless" mode, only needed to save newer data and configurations states of a running system.]

For more information please check Requirements

Installation Overview

The general course of action

[Note: For single-board-computer (SBC) architectures which can not boot .iso images, see Alpine on ARM for peculiarities.]


As usual, the regular installation procedure starts with three basic steps (additional details for all the steps follow below):


1.) Downloading and verifying the proper stable-release ISO installation image-file for the computer's architecture, and the corresponding sha256 (checksum) and GPG (signature) files.

2.) Either burning the ISO image-file onto a blank CD/DVD/Blu-ray disk with disk burning software, or flashing the installation image onto a bootable storage device (USB-device, CF-/MMC-/SD-card, floppy, ...).

3.) Booting the computer from the prepared disk or storage device.


The boot process copies the entire operating system into the RAM memory, then runs it from there, after which, the command line environment does not depend on reading from the (possibly slow) initial boot media.

Log-in is possible as the user root. Initially, the root user has no password.

An interactive script named setup-alpine is available at the command prompt to configure and install the initial Alpine Linux system.

The setup-alpine question-and-answer dialog can configure installations that boot into one of three different Alpinelinux disk modes, "diskless", "data", and "sys". These are explained in more detail in the following subsections. However, a newly installed system may always be configured into a fully usable, standalone, "diskless" live-system by runing setup-alpine and answering "none" when asked for the disk to use, where to store configs, and the location for the package cache.

Once a "diskless" system is configured by running setup-alpine, it's possible to use the apk package manager to install any desired tool that may be missing in the live system to configure available hardware.

Specific hardware configuration may be desired, for example, for available disk drives. e.g. If you need to install a custom partition or filesystem scheme, and if the installation should not use and/or overwrite the entire disk (details below).

After the desired adjustments have been made using the "diskless" system, setup-lbu and setup-apkcache may be run to add persistent configuration and package cache storage to the running "diskless" system. After that, the system state may be saved with lbu commit. Or, setup-disk may be run to add a "data" mode partition, or do a classic full install of the "diskless" system onto a "sys" disk or partition.

More setup-scripts are available to configure other specifics. They may be run separately to set up a system, or to adjust only specific parts later. For example, to set up a graphical environment (covered in Post-Install below).

Diskless Mode

This is the default boot mode of the .iso images. setup-alpine configures this if "disk=none" is selected during installation. It means the entire operating system and all applications are loaded into, then run from, RAM. This is extremely fast and can save on unnecessary disk spin-ups, power, and wear. It is similar to what is called a "frugal" install running with the "toram" option as with some other distros, but without the need to remaster the install media.

Custom configurations and package selections may be preserved across reboots with the Alpine local backup tool lbu. It enables committing and reverting system states using .apkovl files that are saved to writable storage and loaded when booting. If additional or updated packages have been added to the system, these may also be made available for automatic (re)installation during the boot phase, by enabling a local package cache on the writable storage.

[FIXME-1: Storing local configs and the package cache on an internal disk still requires some manual steps to have the partition listed, i.e. making a /etc/fstab entry, mountpoint, and mount, *before* running setup-alpine. And requires manually committing the configuration to disk afterwards.]

To allow for local backups, setup-alpine can be told to store the configs and the package cache on a writable partition. (Later, directories on that same partition or another available partition may also be mounted as /home, or for important applications, e.g. to keep their run-time and user data on it.)

The boot device of the newly configured local "diskless" system may remain the initial (and possibly read-only) installation media. But it is also possible to copy the boot system to a partition (e.g. /dev/sdXY) with setup-bootable.

Data Disk Mode

This mode also runs from system RAM, thus it enjoys the same accelerated operation speed as "diskless" mode. However, swap storage and the entire /var directory tree get mounted from a persistent storage device (two newly created partitions). The directory /var holds e.g. all log files, mailspools, databases, etc., as well as lbu backup commits and the package cache. This mode is useful for having RAM accelerated servers with variable amounts of user-data that exceed the available RAM size. It enables the entire current system state (not just the boot state) to survive a system crash in accordance with the particular filesystem guarantees.

[FIXME-2: Setup-alpine can not yet configure storage of the lbu configs to the "data disk" after selecting one. It's still necessary to first select to save configs to "none" in setup-alpine (the new data partition is not listed), and to manually edit /etc/lbu/lbu.conf to set e.g. LBU_MEDIA=sdXY, then execute a corresponding echo "/dev/sdXY /media/sdXY vfat rw 0 0" >> /etc/fstab afterwards, and save the config with lbu commit to have the partition (here, denoted as sdXY) mounted when booting.]

In data disk mode, the boot device may also remain the initial (and possibly read-only) installation media, or be copied to a partition (e.g. /dev/sdXY) with setup-bootable.

System Disk Mode

This is a traditional hard-disk install.

If this mode is selected, the setup-alpine script creates three partitions on the selected storage device, /boot, swap and / (the filesystem root). This mode may, for example, be used for generic desktop and development machines.

For custom partitioning, see Setting_up_disks_manually.

To install along side another operating systems, see Installing_Alpine_on_HDD_dualbooting.

Additional Details

This material needs expanding ...

This "Additional Details" section needs to be consolidated with the work at https://docs.alpinelinux.org (not finished) (Restructuring things there, moving and linking from here or there?).


Verifying the downloaded image-file

Commands to verify the checksum and GPG signature of a downloaded image-file on different systems.
OS type SHA256 check SHA256 calculation (to be compared manually) GPG signature verification
Linux sha256sum -c alpine-*.iso.sha256 curl https://alpinelinux.org/keys/ncopa.asc | gpg --import ;

gpg --verify alpine-<version>.iso.asc alpine-<version>.iso

MACOS - ? - shasum -a 256 alpine-*.iso - ? -
BSD - ? - /usr/local/bin/shasum -a 256 alpine-*.iso - ? -
Windows (PowerShell installed) - ? - Get-FileHash .\alpine-<image-version>.iso -Algorithm SHA256 - ? -

Flashing (direct data writing) the installation image-file onto a device or media

Unix/Linux

Under Unix (and thus Linux), "everything is a file" and the data in the image-file can be written onto a device or media with the dd command. Afterwards, executing the eject command removes the target device from the system and ensures the write cache is completely flushed. 

dd if=<iso-file-to-read-in> of=<target-device-node-to-write-out-to> bs=4M oflag=sync status=progress; eject <target-device-node-to-write-to>

Be careful to correctly identify the target device as any data on it will be lost! All connected "bulk storage devices" can be listed with lsblk and blkid. 

# lsblk
NAME            MAJ:MIN RM   SIZE RO TYPE  MOUNTPOINT
sdX               0:0    0  64,0G  0 disk  
├─sdX1            0:1    0     2G  0 part  
└─sdX2            0:2    0    30G  0 part  /mnt/sdX2

# blkid
/dev/sdX1: LABEL="some" UUID="..." TYPE="vfat"
/dev/sdX2: LABEL="other" UUID="..." TYPE="ext4"

For example, if /dev/sdX is the desired target device, first make sure you un-mount all mounted partitions of the target device. For example sdX1 and sdX2: 

umount  /dev/sdX1  /dev/sdX2


For dd's output-file (of=), however, do not specify a partition number. For example, write to sdX, not sdX1:

Warning: This will overwrite the target device /dev/sdX, so before executing, make sure you have a backup of the data if you can't afford to lose it. 

dd if=~/Downloads/alpine-standard-3.00.0-x86_64.iso of=/dev/sdX bs=4M oflag=sync status=progress; eject /dev/sdX

Windows

For example, there is the Rufus program. Rufus will enable you to create bootable USB flash drives under Windows.

Rufus has been tested and works for Alpine Linux 3.12.x with the following settings:

  • Partition scheme: MBR
  • Target system: BIOS or UEFI
  • File system: FAT32
  • Cluster size: 4096 bytes (default)

Verifying the written installation media

After detaching and re-attaching the device, a bit-wise comparison can verify the data written to the device (instead of just data buffered in RAM). If the comparison terminates with an end-of-file error on the .iso file side, all the contents from the image have been written (and re-read) successfully: 

# cmp ~/Downloads/alpine-standard-3.00.0-x86_64.iso /dev/sdX
cmp: EOF on alpine-standard-3.00.0-x86_64.iso

Booting from external devices

Insert the boot media to a proper drive or port of the computer and turn the machine on, or restart it, if already running.

If the computer does not automatically boot from the desired device, one needs to bring up the boot menu and choose the media to boot from. Depending on the computer, the menu may be accessed by repeatedly pressing a key quickly when booting starts. Some computers require that you press the button before starting the computer and hold it down while the computer boots. Typical keys are: `F9`-`F12`, sometimes `F7` or `F8`. If these don't bring up the boot menu, it may be necessary to enter the BIOS configuration and adjust the boot settings, for which typical keys are: `Del.` `F1` `F2` `F6` or `Esc.`

Custom partitioning of the harddisk

It is possible to specify configurations for RAID, encryption, LVM, etc. as well as manual partitioning.

For "diskless" or "data disk" mode installs, manual partitioning may be needed to prepare the harddisk for committing local backups of the system state with lbu commit, a package cache, or to use it as the /var mount.

For a "sys" install, custom partitioning is needed only if the desired scheme differs from overwriting an entire disk, or creating the default /boot, swap and root partitions.

See Setting_up_disks_manually for the alpine options for RAID, encryption, LVM, etc. and manual partitioning.

Questions asked by setup-alpine

Example setup-alpine session

The setup-alpine script offers the following configuration options:

  • Keyboard Layout (Local keyboard language and usage mode, e.g. us and variant of us-nodeadkeys.)
  • Hostname (The name for the computer.)
  • Network (For example, automatic IP address discovery with the "DHCP" protocol.)
  • DNS Servers (Domain Name Servers to query. For privacy reasons it is NOT recommended to route every local request to servers like google's 8.8.8.8 .)
  • Timezone
  • Proxy (Proxy server to use for accessing the web. Use "none" for direct connections to the internet.)
  • Mirror (From where to download packages. Choose the organization you trust giving your usage patterns to.)
  • SSH (Secure SHell remote access server. "Openssh" is part of the default install image. Use "none" to disable remote login, e.g. on laptops.)
  • NTP (Network Time Protocol client used for keeping the system clock in sync with a time server. Package "chrony" is part of the default install image.)
  • Disk Mode (Select between diskless (disk="none"), "data" or "sys", as described above.)
 The data on a chosen device will be overwritten!

Preparing for the first boot

If setup-alpine has finished configuring the disk mode "sys", then the system should be ready to reboot right away (see next subsection).

If the new local system was configured to run in "diskless" or "data" mode, and should not keep booting from the initial (and possibly read-only) installation media, then the boot system needs to be copied to another device or partition.

The target partition may be identified using lsblk (after installing it with apk add lsblk) and/or blkid, similar to previously identifying the initial installation media device.

The procedure to copy the boot system is explained at setup-bootable

Once everything is in place, save the locally customized configurations with lbu commit before rebooting.

Rebooting and testing the new system

First, the initial installation media has to be removed from the boot drive, or detached.

Then the system may be power-cycled or rebooted to confirm that everything is working.

The relevant commands for this are poweroff or reboot.


Completing the installation

The installation script only installs the base operating system. No applications such as a web server, mail server, desktop environment, or web browser are installed, and root is the only user.

Please look under "Post-Install" below, for some common things to do after installation.

Further Documentation

Installing



Post-Install

Language support

  • Fix unicode defaults: sed -i s/#unicode="NO"\n\n#/#unicode="NO"\n\nunicode="YES"\n\n#/ /etc/rc.conf
  • apk add musl-locales Installs a limited set of locales (languages) for musl (C library) generated console messages.
  • Listing defined locales is possible with locales -a
  • cp /etc/profile.d/locale.sh /etc/profile.d/locale.sh.sh Copies the default locale settings. Then the custom override file can be edited nano /etc/profile.d/locale.sh.sh.
  • apk add lang Pulls in the translation packages of all installed packages.
  • apk list hunspell* To list available hunspell dictionary packages.
  • apk list *-xy *-xy-* To list translation packages for your specific (xy) language (for example, pt for Portuguese).

Documentation

  • apk add man-pages Installs basic manual pages.
  • apk add mandoc A man command to be able to open man pages.
  • apk add mandoc-apropos The apropos command to search in man pages.
  • apk add docs Pulls in all the *-doc sub-packages of installed packages.








Further Help and Information



Tip: Alpine linux packages stay close to the upstream design. Therefore, all upstream documentation about configuring a software package, as well as good configuration guides from other distributions that stay close to upstream, like e.g. in the Arch Wiki, are to a large degree also well applicable to configure the software on alpine linux, thus can be very useful.

Other Guides

There may still be something useful to find and sort out of some "newbie" install notes in this wiki, but beware that these pages can lack explanations and contain highly opinionated content, redundantly on many convoluted pages.

  1. Newbie_Alpine_Ecosystem
  2. Alpine newbie install manual
  3. Alpine_newbie Install section
  4. https://mckayemu.github.io/alpineinstalls/ All informatin for Spanish users
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