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

Edit the file at /etc/rc.conf and change line 92 to:

 unicode="YES"

• 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 are all busybox symlinks )

  apk add util-linux pciutils usbutils coreutils binutils findutils grep

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