How to get regular stuff working

Basic commands and shell hints

Alpine comes with busybox by default. Busybox is set up as an endpoint for numerous symlinks that substitute various utilities. Though busybox is not that bad, the busybox replacement commands may still be missing some functionality.

To replace the symlinks to busybox, install:

• Shell utilities (things like grep, awk, ls are all busybox symlinks)

apk add util-linux pciutils hwdata-pci usbutils hwdata-usb coreutils binutils findutils grep iproute2

• Bash

It's also easy enough to install bash itself:

apk add bash bash-completion

and optionally, change the login shell with chsh.

Disk Management

Managing (removable) disk is much easier with udisks

Installation

apk add udisks2

To 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 abuild

a complete install for cmake looks like

apk add cmake extra-cmake-modules

ccache is also available

apk add ccache