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
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
It's also easy enough to install bash itself, or any other shell of your choice:
apk add bash bash-completion
and optionally, change the login shell with chsh.
Hardware Management
Install pciutils and usbutils for configuring PCI and USB hardware respectively. You can always remove these packages once the hardware is configured.
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.