Installation

From Alpine Linux
Revision as of 22:55, 8 May 2020 by Sb1 (talk | contribs)

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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

Similar to many other distributions, the first installation steps usually consist of

  1. Downloading one of the latest 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 onto a blank CD with your favorite CD burning software, or flashing a USB storage device with it.
  3. Booting from the CD or USB drive, and logging in to the command line as user root with its initally empty password.

(For installing on ARM systems, see Alpine on ARM.)

However, contrary to most other distributions, this initially booted Alpinelinux system (command line environment) is first copied entirely into RAM, and then it runs completely in RAM, independent from the (slow) initial boot media.

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

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

diskless mode This is the default boot mode of the .iso images. It is used with the setup-alpine selection "disk=none" and means the whole system runs from RAM. Customized configuration and package selections may still be preserved on permanent storage media by using lbu, the "local backup utility", and a local package cache. The boot device usually remains to be the initially used CD, USB drive, Compact Flash or SD card, possibly even set to read-only.

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 preferable when larger amounts of variable user-data needs to be reliably preserved between reboots, e.g. servers with mailspools, databases, or important log files.

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. Depending on the computer it may be necessary to press e.g. the `F12` key to get a boot menu selection to choose 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.)


Booting 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

A way, and an example, to make the stock ISO images load a local backup (apkovl and packages) when booting, can be found in How_to_make_a_custom_ISO_image. (Debian's grub-imageboot package is another way to boot .iso files directly.)

Post-Install

Further Help and Information

See Also

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