Alpine Install: from a disc to PC Engines APU

From Alpine Linux

Overall description: Alpine Installation from an official image tar file downloaded to a real second generation PC Engines APU systems (apu2, apu3, apu4), where it will be single OS only.

This document will guide you to install Alpine into second generation PC Engines APU systems, it was tested with an apu2d4 and Alpine 3.11.6..

Terminology

  • BIOS: it's a system into computer hardware machine laptop or desktops, embedded that will manage the early boot process, see more in the Alpine and UEFI page.
  • New machine: will be your real machine fresh and ready to install your new Alpine operating system, with an installed ISO image where to put the downloaded media installation.
  • Bootable USB: will be your hardware drive input to put the image downloaded iso media with the operating system Alpine to install as source media; this drive are commonly named USB unit.
  • Serial console: is an input port on the device.. DB9 serial port for serial console, located at the board to use as char device, it's common in those devices.
  • Source media: will be the just burned / disc from the downloaded iso file of Alpine operating system. Will be Attach to the serial console to property boot the source disc as media installation.
  • Target media: will be the storage medium device into the new computer target where the Alpine files for operating system will be installed, its one partition from the HardDisk of the new computer.

Booting the Alpine ISO disc

  1. It's probably a good idea to ensure that the BIOS / Firmware is up to date.
  2. Create_a_Bootable_USB thumb drive with the current standard x86_64 image from the downloads page.
  3. Attach to the serial console. Configure your terminal emulator for 115200 8n1.
  4. Power on the APU.
  5. When BIOS prompted, hit F10 and select to boot from USB.
  6. At the boot prompt, quickly type a slash to interrupt the default boot, which has a short timeout.
  7. Continue entering the remainder of this command at your leisure. It should have only one slash at the start, to be clear: /boot/vmlinuz-lts modules=loop,squashfs,sd-mod,usb-storage nomodeset console=ttyS0,115200 initrd=/boot/initramfs-lts
  8. Alpine should come up as normal.

Continue as per Installation.

Which disk choose to use?

To choose the disk destination ..

How would be used?

Then choose type of installation .. those are described at Setup modes section at Alpine setup scripts wiki page. "sys" mode is the familiar install to disk well known for usage as main OS to computers.

After all a confirmation question will raised, type "y" if everything are ok and the setup will proceed to erase, format and copy the files to the destination disk choose!

After reboot

  1. Before rebooting, edit /boot/extlinux.conf.
    1. Add SERIAL 0 115200 as the first line in the file.
    2. In the APPEND line, replace quiet with console=ttyS0,115200
  2. Remove the thumb drive.
  3. Cross your fingers and reboot. The system should boot properly with console on serial.
  4. Edit /etc/update-extlinux.conf so that if extlinux.conf is regenerated it will retain these settings:
    1. Update the line with serial_port to read serial_port=0
    2. Update the serial_baud line to read serial_baud=115200
    3. Update the default_kernel_opts line to replace quiet with console=ttyS0,115200
  5. Run update-extlinux
  6. Examine /boot/extlinux.conf.
    1. Make sure it looks OK. Compare with /boot/extlinux.conf-old.
    2. If something looks wrong, mv /boot/extlinux.conf-old /boot/extlinux.conf to roll back the changes and try to figure out what went wrong
  7. Cross your fingers and reboot. The system should boot properly with console on serial.

See Also

  1. Alpine and UEFI
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