Dualbooting
It's assumed you have a box where you already run another operating system, and would like to be able to dual boot either the installed system or Alpine Linux.
Install Alpine Linux
To Dual boot Alpine Linux, you must follow the setup-disk based Installation.
- Follow the Installation guide to complete the base configuration, if not already done.
- To Dualboot, Alpine Linux needs a separate partition. If you don't have a partition refer Manual partitioning to create and format it. If you are using btrfs filesystem, there is no need to create a partition. Refer btrfs tutorial
- Mount the partition, where you'd like to install Alpine Linux.
# mount /dev/sdXY /mnt
- If you're using EFI, pay special attention to ESP partition. ESP partition is also used by other operating systems. Make sure you create a mount point
/mnt/boot/efi
.# mkdir -p /mnt/boot/efi
- Find the correct partition name for ESP partition and mount it on the above mount point:
# mount /dev/sdXY /mnt/boot/efi
- Install Alpine Linux on the chosen partition.
# setup-disk -m sys /mnt
- Your dual boot installation can be considered complete. You be should be able to dual boot once you reboot. Refer configure bootloader section, if you would like to make additional changes.
Configure bootloader
There are different bootloaders to get a boot menu that allows selecting the operating system to boot. It is easiest to simply install and use rEFInd boot manager for dual boot between Alpine Linux and Windows.
Otherwise, one may adjust the bootloader that has already been installed by the other operating system.
Dual/Multiboot with Linux
The following example is given to give you some ideas for adjusting grub to boot Alpine.
Reboot your system (start Ubuntu).
Start a 'terminal' (ALT-F2 + "terminal" + [Run])
Take notes of the UUID of the partition you are planning to use:
# blkid /dev/sdXY
Start editing the grub2 configuration
# gedit /etc/grub.d/40_custom
I edited the file to look something like this:
Contents of /etc/grub.d/40_custom
Finally the configuration changes need to be applied to the grub2 bootloader:
update-grub
Now it's time to test. Reboot your box.
Dualboot with Windows
For Windows partitions to be detected with grub, you need `os-prober` and `grub-mount` installed at the time grub-mkconfig runs.
To upgrade the grub installation, the efi directory must be mounted in /boot/efi/. To know in which partition the efi is, we must examine the partition table, so if your main disk is /dev/sda then.
# fdisk -l /dev/sda
Device Start End Sectors Size Type /dev/sda1 2048 309247 307200 150M EFI System
# mkdir /boot/efi
# mount /dev/sda1 /boot/efi/
# apk add efibootmgr
(If your system supports UEFI. Most PC's from 2010, support UEFI)
Install grub
# grub-install –root-directory=/mnt
After grub re-installation, unmount efi partition:
# umount /boot/efi/