Installation

Install Procedure

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

1. Downloading the proper stable-release ISO image for your computer's architecture, together with its sha256 checksum and GPG signature files, and then checking the sha265sum checksum of the downloaded image and verifying its GPG signature.
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.

(If you need additional details see below, for installing on ARM systems, however, refer to Alpine on ARM instead.)

Contrary to most other distributions, the boot image already loads a 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, other 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 means the whole operating system runs extremely fast within RAM (saving unnecessary disk spin-ups, power and wear). The configuration and package selection may still be customized, and completely preserved on permanent storage media by using the "local backup utility" lbu and a local package cache (see this setup-alpine trick). (Additionally making some particular applications write to the storage partition would also be possible.)

data mode This mode is still accelerated by running the system from RAM, however the entire /var tree is a mounted persistent data partition. 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, possibly even set to read-only.

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.