How to get regular stuff working
Man pages
Not all man-pages are in Alpine, those who are are not readily available after installing man and man-pages, you also need to install mdocml-pages to have man pages built at install time. Below is the quick and easy commandline:
apk add man man-pages mdocml-pages
Operational hints
Shell @ commandline
Alpine comes with busybox by default, busybox is and endpoint for numerous symlinks for various utilities. Though busybox is not that bad the commands are impaired in functionality.
- funny characters at the console
not all characters are presented accurately, document here how to fix this
- Bash
It is easy enough to have bash installed but this does not mean the symlinks to busybox are gone
install bash like
apk add bash bash-doc bash-completion
- shell utils ( things like grep, awk, ls, brctl ... are all busybox symlinks )
this should document how to have real utils instead of symlinks to busybox
Disk Management
Disk management is soo much easier with udisks or udisks2
Installation
apk add udisks2 udisks2-doc
See the mounted disks
udisksctl status
Compiling : a few notes and a reminder
Compiling in Alpine may be more challenging because it uses musl-libc instead of glibc. Please review 'The functional differences with glibc' if you think of porting packages or just for the sake of knowing, of course.
Alpine offers the regular compiler stuff like gcc and cmake ... possible others
(unvalidated) apk packages to install so one can start building software
apk add build-base gcc abuild binutils binutils-doc gcc-doc
a complete install for cmake looks like
apk add cmake cmake-doc extra-cmake-modules extra-cmake-modules-doc
ccache is also available
apk add ccache ccache-doc