Installing Alpine

There are currently two supported ways of running Alpine, from CDROM or from USB stick.

Preparing the media

CDROM

Download the latest iso image from the download area and burn it.

USB

Alpine is shipped in compressed tar.gz archives for USB.

Make USB-stick bootable

From windows

• Download the syslinux.exe utility.
• Start a command prompt (Start->run, type cmd and press >enter>)
• Run syslinux with your USB drive as parameter. If your USB drive is E:, then you type:

syslinux E:

• Flag the partition bootable

fdisk E:

(Make the partition bootable somehow :-)

From Linux

• install syslinux (I.E sudo apt-get syslinux or emerge apt-get syslinux)
• Copy MBR to the USB drive (assuming your USB drive is /dev/sda)

 dd if=/usr/lib/syslinux/mbr.bin of=/dev/sda

• Run syslinux with your USB drive as parameter.

 sudo syslinux /dev/sda1

• Flag the partition bootable

fdisk /dev/sda
 a (Toggle's the bootable flag)
 1 (The partition you want to have the flag)
 w (Writing your changes to the disk)

Unpack Alpine to USB drive

• Download a alpine-x.x.x-yyyyyy.tar.gz package.
• Unpack all the files to your usb drive using a unpacker like 7-zip.

Initial setup

After booting up you will see a login prompt. Log in as root.

To do the basic initial configuration run:

 setup-alpine

There you will set the hostname, configure the network and set the root password.

Add the following line to your /etc/lbu/lbu.conf file:

 LBU_MEDIA=usb

If you want to store the configureation on floppy you set LBU_MEDIA=floppy instead.

To save the configuration for next reboot run:

 lbu commit

Managing software packages

To list all the packages that are available in repository, run:

 apk_fetch -l
 apk_fetch -v -l

To install a package run:

 apk_add <PACKAGE>

To remove the package run:

 apk_delete <PACKAGE>

To also remove the dependencies togehter with the package, run:

 apk_delete -R <PACKAGE>

To list all installed packages run:

 apk_info

Managing boot services

To start a service during boot run:

 rc_add <service>

Managing local backups

To add a config file to the local backup list run:

 lbu_add /path/to/file

To save all the files in the local backup list to floppy run:

 lbu_commit floppy

To save the configs to USB drive run:

 lbu_commit usb

To list files in the local backup list run:

 cat /etc/backuplist