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.)

Installation Overview

(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.

The boot process first copies the entire system into the RAM memory, and then runs it completely from RAM. So that the started command line environment does not depend on reading from the (slow) initial boot media anymore.

Log-in as the user root with its initially empty password.

Now an interactive script called setup-alpine, as well as more specific setup-scripts, the apk package manager, and all the general command line tools of course, can be used to configure the initial Alpine Linux system, install further packages, and prepare the system for the next boot.

Note that setup-alpine supports to configure the system to boot into one of three general Alpinelinux runtime modes:

diskless mode This is the default boot mode of the .iso images. setup-alpine configures this if selecting to install to "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. [Fixme: setup-alpine still needs this trick to...] Select to store configs on a partition, which will even allow that some particular applications may also keep data on persistent storage).

data mode This mode is still accelerated by running the system from RAM, however swap storage and the whole /var directory tree gets mounted from a persistent storage device (two newly created partitions). 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 having RAM accelerated servers with amounts of variable user-data that exceed the available RAM size, and to let the entire current system state (not just the boot state) survive a system crash according to the particular filesystem's guarantees. [Fixme: Storing lbu configs to disk is not auto-configured, after configuring the data partition, one still has to select saving configs to "none" (new data partition not listed), and afterwards manually setting e.g. LBU_MEDIA=sda2 in /etc/lbu/lbu.conf and echo "/dev/sda2 /media/sda2 vfat rw 0 0" >> /etc/fstab] 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

Note: The details section needs to be consolidated with https://docs.alpinelinux.org. (restructuring/moving things to there and linking here?

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

Installing

• Directly booting an ISO file (Without flashing it to a disk or device)
• Setting up Networking (incl. non-standard configurations)

Post-Install

• Setting up a new user
• setup-xorg-base, if required

• Enable Community Repository (Providing additional packages)
• Package Management (apk) (How to add/remove packages on your Alpine)
  • Back Up a Flash Memory Installation ("diskless mode")
  • Manually editing a existing apkovl
• Init System (OpenRC) (Configure a service to automatically boot at next reboot)
  • Multiple Instances of Services
  • Writing Init Scripts

• Hosting services on Alpine(Links to several mail/web/ssh server setup pages)
• Runnig programs and services in their own Firejail Security Sandbox

• Upgrading Alpine

Further Help and Information

• Running glibc programs (Installation and development)

• FAQs
• Tutorials and Howtos

• How to Contribute
• Developer Documentation
• Wiki etiquette to collaborate on this documentation

See Also

There may still be something useful to find and sort out of the newbie install notes in this wiki, and moving it into the handbook style structured documentation:

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