Installation
Alpine Linux are already installed in your media dumped, it means downloadble media files of Alpine Linux are already the system ready to use directly from the media where are dumped!
Quick Requirements
This is a simple and quick reference list, nowadays any hardware is supported for Alpine Linux:
- At least 128 MEgs of RAM for server without graphical GUI, or at least 1.6 Gigs for graphical desktop
- At least 2 Gigs storage device for server without graphical GUI, or at least 20 Gigs for graphical desktop with web browsing
Highly recommended for more details or if you do not have great knowledge must to read wiki page for requirements: Requirements!
Installation Overview
It must be clear that alpine linux each image source media (whatever you download).. is the system already executable and ready to use, and what is understood as "installing" in reality is to be able to have the installation root on another storage media and make it bootable by the device that handles it.
Download the media source
Just grab from stable-release ISO image, for your computer's architecture, use the "architecture" name in each green button of download page.
Most common case just download x86 or x86_64 types.. for further information check Architectures section and then Media Downloadable section of requirements wiki page.
Optionally you can perform a sha256 checksum as described in Checksum section of Requirements wiki page but is not necessary in general cases.
Dump, burn or flash the image
Depending of your hardware, now can dump the ISO image onto a media source like USB/SD flashing; or CD/DVD/BR disk with burning software.
But you could check Ways_to_install_Alpine_listed_by_architectures wiki page if you have special cases like ARM or s390 machines.
Boot and install process
The boot process first copies the entire system into the RAM memory, and then runs it completely from RAM, so that the started command line environment does not depend on reading from the (slow) initial boot media anymore.
Log-in as the user root with its initially empty password. So there's no need to ask for password at first boot.
Now an interactive script called setup-alpine, can be used to configure the initial Alpine Linux system.
as well as more specific setup-scripts, the apk package manager, and all the general command line tools of course, to install further packages, and to prepare the system for the next boot.
Note that setup-alpine supports to configure the system to boot into one of three general Alpinelinux runtime modes:
diskless mode This is the default boot mode of the .iso images. setup-alpine configures this if selecting to install to "disk=none", and it means that the whole operating system and the applications run extremely fast from within RAM (saving unnecessary disk spin-ups, power and wear). A customized configuration and package selection may still be completely preserved on permanent storage media by using the "local backup utility" lbu and a local package cache. [Fixme: setup-alpine still needs this detour to prepare a partition for this:] In setup-alpine, select to store configs and the package cache on a partition. (That mounted partition may later also be used by configuring some important applications to keep their data on it.)
data mode This mode is still accelerated by running the system from RAM, however swap storage and the whole /var directory tree gets mounted from a persistent storage device (two newly created partitions). This location holds e.g. all log files, mailspools, databases, etc., as well as lbu backup commits and the package cache. The mode is useful for having RAM accelerated servers with amounts of variable user-data that exceed the available RAM size, and to let the entire current system state (not just the boot state) survive a system crash according to the particular filesystem's guarantees. [Fixme: Storing lbu configs to disk is not auto-configured after configuring the data partition, one still has to select saving configs to "none" first (the new data partition is not listed), and to manually set e.g. LBU_MEDIA=sda2 in /etc/lbu/lbu.conf and echo "/dev/sda2 /media/sda2 vfat rw 0 0" >> /etc/fstab afterwards.] The boot device may remain to be the one initially used, and can even be immutable (read-only).
sys mode This is a traditional hard-disk install. If this mode is selected, the setup-alpine script defaults to create three partitions on the selected storage device, /boot, swap and / (the filesystem root). This mode may be used for generic desktop and development machines, for example.
Questions asked by setup-alpine
The setup-alpine script offers to configure:
- Keyboard map (e.g. us and variant of us-nodeadkeys)
- Hostname (The name for the computer.)
- Network (e.g. automatic DHCP IP address discovery)
- DNS Servers (For privacy reasons, it is NOT recommended to use servers like google's 8.8.8.8 etc.)
- Timezone
- Proxy ("None" for direct connections to the internet.)
- SSH (Openssh is part of the default images.)
- NTP (Chrony is part of the default images.)
- Runtime Mode (Select between "diskless" (disk=none), "data" or "sys", all described above.)
Additional Details
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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?).
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 selection for choosing the media to boot from. Depending on the computer the menu may be accessed by quickly (repeatedly) pressing a key when booting starts, or sometimes it is needed to press the button before starting the computer and keep holding it when it 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.`
Rebooting and testing the new system
After the installation is completed, the system may be power-cycled or rebooted to confirm that everything is working. If the configured runtime mode was "sys", then remove the initial installation media to boot the newly installed system.
The relevant commands for this are reboot or poweroff.
Further Documentation
Installing
- Directly booting an ISO file (without flashing it to a disk or device)
- Setting up Networking (incl. non-standard configurations)
Post-Install
- Enable Community Repository (Providing additional packages)
- Package Management (apk) (general search/add/del packages etc.)
setup-xorg-base(display graphics, if required)
- Local backup utility
lbu(persisting RAM system configurations)- Back Up a Flash Memory Installation ("diskless mode" systems)
- Manually_editing_a_existing_apkovl (the stored custom configs)
- Init System (OpenRC) (Configure a service to automatically boot at next reboot)
- Hosting services on Alpine (Links to several mail/web/ssh server setup pages)
- Runnig programs and services in their own Firejail Security Sandbox
- Upgrading Alpine (checking for and installing updates)
- How_to_make_a_custom_ISO_image_with_mkimage
Further Help and Information
- Running glibc programs (Installation and development)
- How to Contribute
- Developer Documentation
- Wiki etiquette to collaborate on this documentation
See Also
There may still be something useful to find and sort out of the newbie's install notes in this wiki, moving godd things into the structured handbook style documentation.