Dualbooting
General
Assume you have a box where you run Ubuntu (or your favourite distro).
Now you would like to be able to boot either Ubuntu or Alpine.
Prepare your hardware
You will need a partition for your Alpine installation.
If you don't already have one free, you need to create a primary partition with enough space for your Alpine installation.
(The tools you use for managing your partitions might differ, so you need to figure out your self how to use them)
Make notes of what partition you will use for your Alpine installation.
(Note: In this example we are going to install Alpine on /dev/sda3)
Installing Alpine on HDD
Now the fun begins... it's time to install Alpine.
Boot on CD using alpine-1.9.3-x86.iso.
Basic setup
Do some basic setup for your Alpine system
setup-alpine
Format HDD-partition
Next we want to format your partition.
We will needs some tools for doing the formatting (we remove them when formatting is done).
apk add e2fsprogs mkfs.ext3 /dev/sda3 apk del e2fsprogs
(Note: Remember to make sure you format the right partition!!! The '/dev/sda3' is only a example.)
Install Alpine
We start by mounting the newly formatted partition (mounting it on /mnt/).
mount -t ext3 /dev/sda3 /mnt
Now it's time to put our files on the partition.
lbu package /tmp/tmp.apkovl.tar.gz cd /mnt tar -xzf /tmp/tmp.apkovl.tar.gz apk add --root /mnt --initdb --repositories-file /etc/apk/repositores --keys-dir /etc/apk/keys $(cat /var/lib/apk/world) acct linux-grsec alpine-base
Your system is now on '/dev/sda3'. Next thing is to be able to boot on it.
Bootloader
On your system you already have a bootloader of some kind.
The bootloaders varies, so you need to figure out how to make it boot your Alpine distro.
Hopefully you get some ideas by looking at the Grub2 example below.
Grub2
In my case I have Grub2 so I will describe what I did to boot Alpine.
Reboot your system (start Ubuntu).
Start a 'terminal' (ALT&F2 + "terminal" + [Run])
Take notes of the UUID of the partition you are planning to use
sudo blkid /dev/sda3
Start editing grub2 configuration
gksudo gedit /etc/grub.d/40_custom
I edited the file so it looks something like this:
#!/bin/sh exec tail -n +3 $0 echo "Adding Alpine" >&2 cat << EOF menuentry "Alpine Linux" { set root=(hd0,3) linux /boot/vmlinuz-grsec root=UUID=8de6973a-4a8c-40ed-b710-c4e2b42d6b7a modules=sd-mod,usb-storage,ext3 quiet initrd /boot/initramfs-grsec } EOF
(Note: The UUID-value mentioned above '8de6973a-4a8c-40ed-b710-c4e2b42d6b7a' should be replaced with the UUID you got when running your 'blkid' command.) We need to tell grub2 that the config has changed
update-grub2
Now it's time to test.
Reboot your box.
(Note: In order to see the grub-menu, you need to press SHIFT when booting up your box.)