Graphics driver

Many desktop environments need a graphics driver to work properly. Graphics cards of recent vintage need a driver to work. So one needs to install one of the below graphics drivers before installing a desktop:

Information about the video cards that are installed in the computer may be found using lspci command, which is not available by default. Refer the instructions to install pciutils package.

To identify the graphics card (the Subsystem output shows the specific model), issue the below command:

lspci -v | grep -A1 -e VGA -e 3D

Then, install an appropriate driver.

• For Intel video chipsets, see Intel Video
• For AMD Radeon Chipsets, see Radeon Video
• For Nvidia Chipsets, see Nvidia Video

To install X11 based desktop, you may want to install specific Xorg xf86 driver packages for your video card's chipset, as they may support specific features, effects and acceleration modes, and avoid error messages during X initialization. However, the most basic X features should work fine with just using the default kernel video-modesetting drivers.

Tip: xf86 driver packages follow standard naming conventions. So information found in ArchWiki, or Gentoo wiki are to a large degree, also applicable to configuring the video hardware on Alpine Linux, except for proprietary drivers which are not available.

To see available xf86 video driver packages run:

$ apk search xf86-video

• For Sis video chipset install xf86-video-sis
• For VMware guests use xf86-video-vmware
• For VirtualBox guests use xf86-video-vboxvideo. Refer VirtualBox guest additions
• For Hyper-V guests use xf86-video-fbdev. Refer Hyper-V guest services.
• For KVM/QEMU guests refer Xorg within QEMU