Installation

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

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

(To install on ARM systems that do not support .iso images refer to Alpine on ARM instead.)

As with most linux distributions, the first installation steps usually consist of:
(additional details below)

1. Downloading the proper stable-release ISO image for your computer's architecture, together with its sha256 checksum and GPG signature files, and verifying the checksum and GPG signature of the downloaded image.
2. Either burning the ISO image onto a blank CD/DVD/Blue-ray disk with your favorite disk burning software, or flashing the image onto a bootable storage device (USB-device, CF-/MMC-/SD-card, floppy, ...).
3. Booting the computer from the prepared disk or storage device.

Contrary to most other distributions, the boot image already loads the complete, basic Alpine Linux system (command line environment). The boot process has first copied the entire system into the RAM memory, and then runs it completely from RAM. So that the running environment does not depend on reading from the (slow) initial boot media anymore.

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

Now a script called setup-alpine, as well as more specific other setup-scripts, and the apk package manager are available to configure the initial Alpine Linux system, install further packages, and 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 gets configured with setup-alpine if selecting "disk=none", and it means that the whole operating system and the applications run extremely fast from within RAM (saving unnecessary disk spin-ups, power and wear). A customized configuration and package selection may still be completely preserved on permanent storage media by using the "local backup utility" lbu and a local package cache (see this setup-alpine trick, which even allows that some individual applications may also keep data on persistent storage).

data mode This mode is still accelerated by running the system from RAM, however the /var directory gets mounted from persistent storage. This location holds e.g. all log files, mailspools, databases, etc., as well as lbu backup commits and the package cache. The mode is useful for accelerated servers with large amounts of variable user-data that exceeds the available RAM size, and when the entire current system state should survive system interruptions based on the particular filesystem's guarantees. The boot device may remain to be the one initially used, and possibly even be immutable read-only.

sys mode This is a 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 Details

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 offers to configure several things, including:

• Keyboard map (e.g. us and variant of us-nodeadkeys)
• Hostname (The name for the computer.)
• Network (e.g. automatic DHCP discovery)
• DNS Servers (For privacy reasons, it is NOT recommended to use central servers like google's 8.8.8.8 etc.)
• Timezone
• Proxy ("None" for direct connections to the internet.)
• SSH (Openssh is part of the default images.)
• NTP (Chrony is part of the default images.)
• Runtime Mode (Select between "diskless" (disk=none), "data" or "sys", all 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

• Wiki etiquette to collaborate on this documentation

• Directly booting an ISO file without flashing to a disk or device.

Post-Install

TODO: Adding commmunity repository

• Alpine post install packages and setup configurations for new users
• 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 up a new user
• Runnig programs and services in their own Firejail Security Sandbox

Further Help and Information

• Setting up Networking
• 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