Installation
Please do help with sorting out the current wiki documentation, as soon as exploring around gives you a grasp good enough to sort out 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:
- Downloading one of the latest stable-release ISOs, and comparing the downloaded image's
sha265sumchecksum to the one in the corresponding*.sha256checksum file, and to verify its GPG signature. - Either burning the ISO image onto a blank CD with your favorite CD burning software, or flashing the image on a USB storage device.
- Booting from the CD or USB drive.
(For installing on ARM systems, see Alpine on ARM.)
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 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 operating system runs extremely fast within RAM and not stressing the storage devices (power saving, no wear, no unneeded disk spin-ups). Customized configurations 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 can remain 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 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.
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.)
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
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
- Alpine post install packages and setup configurations for new users
- Setting up Networking
- Package Management (apk) (How to add/remove packages on your Alpine)
- Alpine local backup (lbu) (Permanently store your modifications in case your box needs reboot)
- Init System (OpenRC) (Configure a service to automatically boot at next reboot)
- Setting up Xorg
- Setting up a ssh-server (Using ssh is a good way to administer your box remotely)
- setup-acf (Configures ACF (webconfiguration) so you can manage your box through https)
- 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)