This page is about creating a customizable boot device. The creation (flashing) of a default (iso) installation media is covered on the Installation page.

A customizable Alpine Linux boot medium is basically an Alpine system installed to the device in diskless or data disk-mode.

As long as the device remains writable, the local configs (.apkovl) and the package cache may also be stored on the same device.

Requirements

In order to follow this document, you will need:

An Alpine Linux CD-ROM or an .iso file containing the correct Alpine release (Download).
A USB drive (flash, external HD, card reader, etc.)

Using setup-bootable

The preferable method to create a custom bootable device now is to follow the Installation for a diskless or data mode system on the device, and use the setup-bootable script to make the device bootable.

Manually copying Alpine files

This process applies to Alpine Linux 1.9.0 or later.

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Finishing installation

After one has booted the previously created Alpine Linux bootable USB medium, one has to prepare USB stick to hold local customizations and run setup-alpine to finish the installation.

First let's find out where is our just booted USB media mounted, the location could vary.

# mount | grep /media
/dev/sda1 on /media/sda1 type vfat (rw,relatime,fmask=0022,dmask=0022,codepage=437,iocharset=utf8,shortname=mixed,errors=remount-ro)

Create local directory on USB media to hold local APK cache (see APK Local Cache for details).

# mount -o remount,rw /media/sda1
# mkdir /media/sda1/cache
# setup-apkcache /media/sda1/cache
# ls -l /etc/apk/cache
lrwxrwxrwx    1 root     root            17 Oct 19 13:16 /etc/apk/cache -> /media/sda1/cache

Now run setup-alpine and proceed until a question about local disk selection - in diskless mode we won't use any disk (ie. our bootable media files is basically untouched) and we are going to use sda1 to hold our system customization.

# setup-alpine
...
Which disk(s) would you like to use? (or '?' for help or 'none') [none] 
Enter where to store configs ('floppy', 'sda1', 'usb' or 'none') [sda1]: 
Enter apk cache directory (or '?' or 'none') [/media/sda1/cache]:

After the installer finished you can see how many created/modified files are detected and will be added to the backup:

# lbu status
# lbu status | wc -l
59
# lbu commit
# ls -l /media/sda1/*apkovl.tar.gz
-rwxr-xr-x    1 root     root          9591 Oct 19 15:23 /media/sda1/foo.apkovl.tar.gz

Now all the customization are saved into the foo.apkovl.tar.gz compressed tarball on the USB stick itself.

Troubleshooting

Slow USB Devices

Specifying the 'waitusb=X' option at the end of the syslinux.cfg line might help with certain USB devices that take a bit longer to register. X stands for the amount of seconds kernel will wait before looking for the installation media.

append initrd=/boot/grsec.gz alpine_dev=usbdisk:vfat modules=loop,cramfs,sd-mod,usb-storage quiet waitusb=3

Configure Networking
Setting up a SSH server (Using ssh is a good way to administer your box remotely)
Package Management (apk) (How to add/remove packages on your Alpine)
Init System (rc) (Configure a service to automatically boot at next reboot)
Alpine local backup (lbu) (Permanently store your modifications in case your box needs reboot)

Create a Bootable Device