Getting Started with Alpine Linux
This document contains general instructions for getting started with Alpine Linux. If you’re a student in one of my courses, please check your assignment instructions to see if special steps are required instead of these general instructions.
Obtaining Alpine Linux
Note to Students: If you are taking one of my courses, please check Moodle to see if I have provided a customized version of Alpine Linux for your course.
The edition of Alpine Linux that you need depends on your project. For projects that are entirely in virtual machines, you can download the “Virtual” flavor. If you’re going to be installing directly onto hardware, I recommend the “Extended” ISO file for x86_64. If you’re targeting a Raspberry Pi, use one of the Raspberry Pi releases.
Reference Material
Alpine Basics
When you boot into the Alpine Linux installation environment, you are in a basic Alpine system that runs from RAM. This system uses BusyBox with the Almquist shell (ash), which doesn’t have as many features as the default shell in many other distributions (typically the Bourne-again Shell, or bash). For the purposes of performing the installation, this difference shouldn’t matter too much. However, you will want to install bash or zsh to use as your day-to-day shell after performing the initial installation.
By default, the editor that you will need to use for adjusting configuration files is vi, which is a fairly limited version that comes with BusyBox. You might want to watch my demonstration video, A Minimal Introduction to Vi, if you aren’t already familiar with this editor.
There are several possible installation modes for Alpine Linux, including diskless, data disk, and system (sys) modes. For a desktop environment or authentication/authorization server, you’re going to want to install in system (sys) mode. A Web stack could use either sys or data disk mode.