Installing Alpine on HDD overwriting everything
Warning: This will erase everything on your machine's harddisk. Don't blame me if someone sues you for this, your cat dies etc. You are warned.
The following is meant to be an absolute newbie guide
- Burn the Alpine ISO image to a CD
- Put the CD into the new computer and turn on the power.
- Wait for the text login: to appear, type root and press enter.
- Run the setup-alpine script
- Choose your keyboard, as an example, I chose us
- Then I chose the us variant
- Host name, which will be the name of your computer, you can just press enter if you want to use the default
- Choose your network card, most people can just go with the default (press enter)
- Most people will use DHCP, so press enter again, or you can enter in your static IP address
- You will be asked if you want to do any manual network configuration, press enter for no
- Type in your root password
- Choose a time zone, you can get a list my pressing ?. If you want a sub zone, e.g. Africa, type in Africa and press enter, ? will give you a list of sub zones in Africa
- Press enter to choose the fastest mirror
- Choose an SSH server, this allows you to remotely manage your machine. OpenSSH is what the big distro's use, Dropbear is a tiny SSH replacement. Choose none for best security.
- Choose an NTP client, this keeps your machine's time accurate using an Internet time server. Openntpd is what the big distro's use, while Chrony is a tiny replacement.
- Choose a disk you want to install Alpine onto, as an example, I choose sda
- Now choose how you would like to use it, for this guide, choose sys, this will install the entire OS onto your hard drive
- You are given a final chance to back out, type in Y to continue
- Choose your keyboard, as an example, I chose us
- The installation is now complete and you will be asked to reboot. Type in reboot and press enter
Take out the CD, and your computer should boot into Alpine using your hard drive.
Continue Setting up your Computer
- Alpine Linux package management (How to add/remove packages on your Alpine)
- Alpine boot services (Configure a service to automatically boot at next reboot)
- Setting up a ssh-server (Using ssh is a good way to administer your box remotely)
- Tutorials and Howtos (Various tutorials, including how to setup a XFCE desktop)