Fequently Asked Questions

General

I have found a bug, where can I report it?

From alpine run:

setup-problem-reporting

That will help you set up outgoing mailserver and will configure your email address. Then you can run send-pr to submit a bug.

TIP: If you have problems with the vi editor, try installing nano. Set the environment variable EDITOR to make send-pr use nano.

apk_add nano
echo "EDITOR=nano" >> /etc/profile
export EDITOR=nano
send-pr

Otherwise its just to send an email to bugs [at] alpinelinux.org. Please make the bug report as specific as possible.

For general tips how to write a good bug reports, see this article.

How can I contribute?

You can contribute by using the software and give feedback. You can contribute by helping with the documenting your experiences using this wiki.

Your contributions are highly appreciated.

Audio

How do I play my .ogg/.mp3 files?

First, the sound card should be recognized (you must have /dev/snd/***** files)

sox, mpg321, mpg123, oggplay, etc all use the oss sound driver, while Alpine uses ALSA drivers. So you need to load the snd-pcm-oss compatibility module. While you're at it, you might need aumix to turn up the sound volume

echo snd-pcm-oss >> /etc/modules
modprobe snd-pcm-oss 
apk_add aumix sox
aumix (set volume settings)
play really_cool_song.mp3

Configuration

How do I set local timezone?

Help needed to write this. Meanwhile: http://leaf.sourceforge.net/doc/buci-tz3.html http://www.sonoracomm.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=107&Itemid=32

Packages

Can you build an apk package for ...?

Yes, I probably can. Please check if your wanted package exist in gentoo portage by searching in http://packages.gentoo.org. Please post a package request on alpine-devel mailing list and we will look at it.

If there is no Gentoo package, then the best would be to create and ebuild and submit it to http://bugs.gentoo.org. Once your package is in gentoo its very easy to create and maintain the package in Alpine. During special conditions, we might create and maintain this package in the Alpine portage overlay, but its best if it could be officially included in Gentoo.

Currently, packages that require gettext, iconv, java or mono will be rejected for technical reasons. Packages requiring xorg, ruby, python perl, php or will most likely also be rejected but not for technical reasons.

How can i build my own package?

If you need compile you will need a toolchain to do it for you. Use the alpine-buildroot as base and set up a Gentoo hardened uclibc chroot.

If you want to create a package that just containins scripts, then you can simply create a tar.gz package and give it a proper name. There is a utlity, apk_create, to assist you in creating packages. The man page has details on internals.