Installing Alpine Linux

I'm using Debian Stable for almost 2 years ago, because this work out-of-box. I'm tried other distribution before like Ubuntu, Arch Linux and also NixOS, but still I came back to Debian when I always screw up something and Internet doesn't solve my problem.

NOTE : I'm not Linux Expert, I using Windows 10 for mostly time. This only my experience installing Alpine Linux on real computer.

Setup Alpine Linux

Download Alpine Linux ISO you can actually download here and install it to live media, in this case I will use dd command

dd bs=4M if=path/to/alpine-linux.iso of=/dev/sdx status=progress oflag=sync

Replace sdx with your drive, example /dev/sdb (without a partition number).

Boot from your drive, login as root without password (let it blank).

You can run setup by running setup-alpine command and select disk to install, but in my case. I need dual-booting with Windows, so here my workflow.

First, Run setup-alpine, you'll promoted Which disk your like to use? Answer None, and other prompt answer is None and another one None.

Now it's time, We need configure our partition. My Partition looks like this

Device     Boot     Start       End   Sectors   Size Id Type
/dev/sda1  *         2048    206847    204800   100M  7 HPFS/NTFS/exFAT
/dev/sda2          206848 215541759 215334912 102.7G  7 HPFS/NTFS/exFAT
/dev/sda3       215541760 567465983 351924224 167.8G  7 HPFS/NTFS/exFAT
/dev/sda4       567465984 625141759  57675776  27.5G 83 Linux

I will use /dev/sda1 as boot partition and /dev/sda4 as root.

Now I need install e2fsprogs and format partition boot and root

apk add e2fsprogs
mkfs.ext4 /dev/sda1
mkfs.ext4 /dev/sda4

After that, Mount the newly formatted partition.

mount -t ext4 /dev/sda4 /mnt
mount -t ext4 /dev/sda1 /mnt/boot

And then, install Alpine Linux to partition.

setup-disk -m sys /mnt

Setup GRUB

Boot to your Alpine Linux, and login as root. And then Install GRUB

apk add grub grub-bios
grub-install

When Installation complete, make configuration GRUB.

grub-mkconfig -o /boot/grub/grub.cfg

Optionally you can remove syslinux with command:

apk del syslinux

Edit your grub.cfg file you can use nano or vim, I will use vim, so command is:

vim /boot/grub/grub.cfg

Add new line after Alpine Linux Command with text below:

menuentry 'Windows'  {
    insmod part_msdos
    insmod ntfs
    insmod ntldr
    set root='hd0,msdosx'
    search --no-floppy --fs-uuid --hint-bios=hd0,msdosx --hint-efi=hd0,msdosx --hint-baremetal=ahci0,msdosx [YOUR_UUID_HERE]
}

Replace msdosx with your partition number for example msdos2 for /dev/sda2

For [YOUR_UUID_HERE] you need replace with your partition UUID with command below:

lsblk -f

Result command is like this :

NAME   FSTYPE LABEL UUID                                 FSAVAIL FSUSE% MOUNTPOINT
sda
├─sda1 ext4         0ec2f530-8223-4c79-b4f9-a803df4e7608   59.2M    29% /boot
├─sda2 ntfs         D4B6DB4FB6DB312A
├─sda3 ntfs         30A615A7A6156F1A
└─sda4 ext4         09ec3a07-e290-4672-b19d-4340e687bf79   23.8G     7% /

You can see partition sda2 UUID is D4B6DB4FB6DB312A

Test-Drive

I am testing this on super low-end computer, AMD X2 240 @ 2.8GHz with 2 GB RAM. Window Manager I use for this test is Sway. Here some approach when I use Alpine Linux.

Its very smooth nothing crash and annoying bug on Window Manager, but many packages is missing, some my basics is not there, but on edge repositories. I tried to add it on and I facing more bugs because package is still not quite yet to use.

Some bug encounter

If your know anything for to fix this, please let me know.

GTK Issue on Firefox (firefox-71.0-r1), Chromium (79.0.3945.88-r0) and GIMP (2.10.12-r2) or maybe effects to other GTK-based Application.

Closing Up

Using Desktop in Alpine Linux is like cross a river, your have to be prepared with coming waves. But after your pass it, your learn something.

Dani Pragustia's Website