Install Alpine in QEMU

Before You Start

• Download the latest Alpine image.
• Install QEMU on your system (e.g. sudo apt install qemu on Ubuntu, yum -y install qemu on Fedora)

If you are using Alpine Linux, you can install:

# apk add qemu qemu-img qemu-system-x86_64 qemu-ui-gtk

Create the Virtual Machine

Create a disk image if you want to install Alpine Linux.

qemu-img create -f qcow2 alpine.qcow2 8G

The following command starts QEMU with the Alpine ISO image as CDROM, the default network configuration, 512MB RAM, the disk image that was created in the previous step, and CDROM as the boot device.

qemu-system-x86_64 -m 512 -nic user -boot d -cdrom alpine-standard-3.21.0-x86_64.iso -hda alpine.qcow2 -display gtk -enable-kvm

Tip: Remove option -enable-kvm if your hardware does not support this.

Log in as root (no password) and run:

setup-alpine

Follow the setup-alpine installation steps.

Run poweroff to shut down the machine.

Booting the Virtual Machine

After the installation, QEMU can be started from disk image (-boot c) without CDROM.

qemu-system-x86_64 -m 512 -nic user -hda alpine.qcow2