Installation

Please do help with sorting out the current wiki documentation, as soon as exploring around further pages gives you a grasp good enough to sort out the further things.

Typical Hardware Requirements

• At least 100 MB of RAM (A graphical desktop system may require up to 1 GB minimum.)
• A writable storage device. (Required for the "sys" or "data" runtime modes (see below). Optional for making backups in "diskless" mode.)

Install Procedure

As with most linux distributions, the first installation steps usually consist of:

1. Downloading one of the stable-release ISOs, and comparing the downloaded image's sha265sum checksum to the one in the corresponding *.sha256 checksum file, and to verify its GPG signature.
2. Either burning the ISO image onto a blank CD with your favorite CD burning software, or flashing the image onto a bootable storage device (USB-device, CF-/SD-card, ...).
3. Booting the computer from the CD or storage device.

(For installing on ARM systems refer to Alpine on ARM, instead.)

However, contrary to most other distributions, this already boots a complete, basic Alpinelinux system (command line environment). The boot process has first copied the entire system into RAM, and now it runs completely in RAM, independent from the (slow) initial boot media.

Log in to the command line as the user root with its initally empty password.

Now a script called setup-alpine, and other tools, are available to configure the initial Alpinelinux system, to install further packages, and to prepare the system for the next boot.

The system can be configured to boot into one of three general Alpinelinux runtime modes:

diskless mode This is the default boot mode of the .iso images. It is configured with setup-alpine if selecting "disk=none", and means the whole operating system runs extremely fast within RAM and does not require any access the storage devices after booting anymore (saving power, wear, and unnecessary disk spin-ups). The running configuration and package selection may still be changed, and even preserved on permanent storage media by using the "local backup utility" lbu and a local package cache (see this setup-alpine trick).

data mode This mode does still run mostly from RAM, with the exception of a selected writable data partition that gets mounted as /var. This mode is useful when larger amounts of variable user-data needs to be reliably preserved between reboots, e.g. servers with mailspools, databases, or some important log files. The boot device may remain to be the initially used CD, USB drive, Compact Flash or SD card, possibly even set to read-only. But particular installed applications could access the data storage device, whenever the application actually requires to read or write some data.

sys mode This is the traditional hard-disk install. If this mode is selected, the setup-alpine script defaults to create three partitions on the selected storage device, /boot, swap and / (the filesystem root). This mode may be used for generic desktop and development machines, for example.

Additional Hints

Booting from external devices

Insert the boot media to a proper drive or port of the computer, while it is turned off, and turn the machine on. However, depending on the computer it may be necessary to quickly press e.g. one of the `F7` `F8` F9` `F10` `Esc.` `F2` `F3` or `F12` key early to get to a boot menu selection for choosing the media to boot from.

Questions asked by setup-alpine

The setup-alpine script will ask to configure several things, including:

• Keyboard map (e.g. us and variant of us-nodeadkeys)
• Hostname (The name for the computer.)
• Network options
• DNS options: For privacy reasons, it is NOT recommended to use central servers like 8.8.8.8 (google).
• Timezone
• Proxy ("None" to connect directly to the internet.)
• SSH (Openssh is part of the default images.)
• NTP (Chrony is part of the default images.)
• Mode (Select between "diskless", "data" or "sys" as described above.)

Rebooting and using the new system

After the installation is completed, depending on the run mode, the initial installation media may be removed and the system may be power-cycled or rebooted directly with the new installation, to confirm that everything is working.

The command needed for this is poweroff or reboot.

Further Documentation

• Directly booting an ISO file

Post-Install

• Alpine post install packages and setup configurations for new users
• Setting up Networking
• Package Management (apk) (How to add/remove packages on your Alpine)
  • Back Up a Flash Memory ("diskless mode") Installation
  • Manually editing a existing apkovl
• Init System (OpenRC) (Configure a service to automatically boot at next reboot)
  • Multiple Instances of Services
• Writing Init Scripts
• Setting up Xorg

• Upgrading Alpine

• Setting up a ssh-server (Using ssh is a good way to administer your box remotely)
• Hosting services on Alpine(Links to several mail/web/ssh server setup pages)
• Changing passwords

• Setting the timezone (Not needed for the default musl- or uClibc-based installs)

• Setting up a new user

Further Help and Information

• FAQs
• Tutorials and Howtos
• How to Contribute
• Developer Documentation

• Running glibc programs Installation and Dev

See Also

1. Newbie_Alpine_Ecosystem
2. Alpine newbie install manual
3. https://mckayemu.github.io/alpineinstalls/ All informatin for Spanish users