Post installation - Alpine Linux https://wiki.alpinelinux.

org/wiki/Post_installation

Post installation
This material is work-in-progress ...
Still might be missing some things but (i think) it is mostly complete
(Last edited by Guest09248 on 6 Jan 2022.)

Contents
General Notes
Network setup
Wi-Fi
Ethernet (Wired)
Creating a new user account
Groups
Shell
Repositories
Installing a Display Server (for graphical sessions)
Xorg
Wayland
Fonts
Installing a desktop environment or window manager
Sound
Man pages
Language support
Miscellaneous
basic tools
Troubleshooting
I dont have permission to do anything in my user's home directory
See also

General Notes
▪ When # is displayed before a command that means the command needs to be run with root privileges,

▪ Anything in < > is likely just a placeholder that you need to replace (example: <editor> file.txt)

▪ Some information in here might be a repeat of information in other wiki pages, if you find a section where that is the case
please add a link to the original wiki page.

Network setup

Wi-Fi

▪ Wi-Fi
▪ NetworkManager

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Ethernet (Wired)

This material needs expanding ...

Documentation on Ethernet (Wired) internet setup needs to be created/expanded, maybe information from other
wiki's/docs might be helpful?

▪ Ethernet
▪ NetworkManager

Creating a new user account

After installing Alpine by default you only get a root account. You will probably want to create an account that is not root,

# adduser <YourUsername>

Note: replace <YourUsername> with the username of your choice

You will probably want to install doas so you can allow <YourUsername> to use root privileges

# apk add doas

If you want your user to be able to use root privileges add them to the Wheel group

# adduser <YourUsername> wheel

Allow members of the Wheel group to use root privileges with doas:

# <editor> /etc/doas.d/doas.conf

add this to a new line:

permit persist :wheel

Switch to the new account type exit in the shell and login with the new user,

Groups
Groups are needed for certain operations on your system (e.g audio to manage your system audio), below is a list of groups,

Note: may be incomplete, if you see a group missing please add it along with a description

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disk:x:6:root,adm Only if need usage vith virtual machines and access to other partitions over ne
lp:x:7:lp If will need to use printing services and printers management
floppy:x:11:root Backguard compatible group, use only if need access to external special devices
audio:x:18: Need for audio listening and management of sound volumes as normal user
cdrom:x:19: For access to disck writers and mounting DVD, BR or CD rom disk as normal user
dialout:x:20:root Need for dial private connections and use of modems as normal users
tape:x:26:root Need have into this if plan to use special devices for backup.. rarelly in no s
video:x:27:root For usage of cameras, mor thant one GPU special features, as normal user
netdev:x:28: For network connections management as normal user
kvm:x:34:kvm Only if as normal user will manage graphically virtual machines.. rarelly on no
games:x:35: Need if you want to play games also specially need if will share score between
cdrw:x:80: To write RW-DVD, RW-BR or RW-CD disk on a disk writing device
apache:x:81: Need if you will perfom development as normal user and want to publish locally
usb:x:85: Need to access to special usb devices, deprecated group
users:x:100:games If you plan to used common files for all users, mandatory as desktop usage

To add your user to a group use the following command:

# adduser <YourUsername> <group>

Note: you need to log out for the group change(s) to take effect

Shell
Note: ash (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Almquist_shell) is the only shell included with Alpine by default, you will
need to install another shell if you want a different one

By default AlpineLinux uses the ash (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Almquist_shell) shell, but many users may prefer bash (https://pk
gs.alpinelinux.org/packages?name=bash&branch=edge&repo=&arch=x86_64&maintainer=), zsh (https://p
kgs.alpinelinux.org/packages?name=zsh&branch=edge&repo=&arch=x86_64&maintainer=), fish (https://
pkgs.alpinelinux.org/packages?name=fish&branch=edge&repo=&arch=x86_64&maintainer=) or another shell, to
change this run the following command:

$ chsh

enter your password and you should get the following output:

Contents of $ chsh

Changing the login shell for user

Enter the new value, or press ENTER for the default
Login Shell [/bin/ash]:

now enter the path for the shell you want to use (e.g /bin/bash) and press enter to confirm this change,

Note: You may need to log out or reboot for this change to take effect, ash is a part of busybox so you can revert
back to ash at anytime with the same steps

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Repositories
The Alpine software repositories have three branches:

▪ Main: Main packages are the Alpine software that has direct support and updates from the Alpine core and main team. They
also have official special documentation, are always available for all releases and will have substitutions if some are not
continued from upstream. Commonly, those packages are selected due to their responsibility and stability with respect to
upstream availability. When those in testing perform well or are mature, they go to the main branch.
▪ Community: Community packages are those made by users in concert with the official developers and integrated into the
Alpine packages. They are user supported. Support could end if the user ends support with respect to Alpine work. For
example, could not include substitution in next release due to lack of support by the upstream author. They are in edge and
when accepted, go to the community branch.
▪ Edge: New packages come into testing repositories of the edge Alpine version and are those made by any contributor or
man power on Alpine. The edge contains unstable current development content. This branch has no release linked or related
to Alpine. They are in testing and when accepted, go to the community branch.

By default only the main repository is enabled, most users will probably want to enable the community repository, to enable a repository
remove the # in front of the url along with any blank space.

(Example) Disabled:

Contents of /etc/apk/repositories

#http://dl-cdn.alpinelinux.org/alpine/v3.15/community

(Example) Enabled:

Contents of /etc/apk/repositories

http://dl-cdn.alpinelinux.org/alpine/v3.15/community

To edit the repositories open the file in a text editor:

# <editor> /etc/apk/repositories

Example default configuration:

Contents of /etc/apk/repositories

#/media/cdrom/apks
http://dl-cdn.alpinelinux.org/alpine/v3.15/main
# http://dl-cdn.alpinelinux.org/alpine/v3.15/community
#http://dl-cdn.alpinelinux.org/alpine/edge/main
#http://dl-cdn.alpinelinux.org/alpine/edge/community
#http://dl-cdn.alpinelinux.org/alpine/edge/testing

Note: The edge repositories contain unstable and/or possibly untested packages use at your own risk!

To avoid having to manually update the verison in /etc/apk/repositories for each Alpine Linux update, change v3.15 to latest-stable

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Example:

Contents of /etc/apk/repositories

#/media/cdrom/apks
http://dl-cdn.alpinelinux.org/alpine/latest-stable/main
http://dl-cdn.alpinelinux.org/alpine/latest-stable/community
#http://dl-cdn.alpinelinux.org/alpine/edge/main
#http://dl-cdn.alpinelinux.org/alpine/edge/community
#http://dl-cdn.alpinelinux.org/alpine/edge/testing

Note: Changing the repositories to latest-stable may initiate unexpected release upgrades, do this at your own risk!

For security reasons (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTPS#Technical) it may be a good idea to change the url's from http to https

Example:

Contents of /etc/apk/repositories

#/media/cdrom/apks
https://dl-cdn.alpinelinux.org/alpine/v3.15/main
https://dl-cdn.alpinelinux.org/alpine/v3.15/community
#https://dl-cdn.alpinelinux.org/alpine/edge/main
#https://dl-cdn.alpinelinux.org/alpine/edge/community
#https://dl-cdn.alpinelinux.org/alpine/edge/testing

Note: some Alpine Linux package mirrors may not support https, if that is the case you will need to revert back or
change mirrors

Once you have edited /etc/apk/repositories sync the repositories with:

# apk update

Installing a Display Server (for graphical sessions)

Xorg
Most desktop enviroments (DE) or Windows Managers (WM) require Xorg (also called: X11, X), although in the future many will fully
migrate to Wayland currently Xorg is still widely used,

There is two ways you can get Xorg installed,

By default Alpine Linux provides a script that will install Xorg, run the following command to install Xorg:

# setup-xorg-base

or

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# apk add xorg-server xorg-server-common xorg-server-dev xorgproto xorgxrdp xorgxrdp-dev

Note: the apk add method is probably incomplete

Wayland
See also: Wayland

This material needs expanding ...

Wayland documentation needs to be expanded

Fonts
If you plan to use a graphical environment you may need/want to install fonts

Note: depending on the desktop environment/window manager fonts may or may not be installed automatically or as
dependencies

See: Fonts

Installing a desktop environment or window manager

See: Desktop environments and Window managers

Sound
By default Alpine doesnt come with any Sound managment out of the box, these are your options:

▪ PipeWire
▪ PulseAudio
▪ ALSA

Note: If your unsure pipewire (https://pkgs.alpinelinux.org/packages?name=pipewire&branch=edge&re

po=&arch=x86_64&maintainer=) is the recommended option

Man pages
Most Linux distributions have man pages, man pages allow you type man <package> in a terminal and get some useful information about
packages installed on your system quicky without a internet connection, by default Alpine does not include man, you can add that with the
following:

▪ # apk add man-pages Installs basic manual pages.

▪ # apk add mandoc Installs the man command to be able to open man pages.
▪ # apk add mandoc-apropos Installs the apropos command to search in man pages.
▪ # apk add docs Installs all the *-doc sub-packages of installed packages.

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Note: man pages may not be available for every package

Language support
This material needs expanding ...
Please feel free to help us complete it.

▪ Fix unicode defaults: sed -i 's/#unicode="NO"/#unicode="NO"\nunicode="YES"/' /etc/rc.conf

▪ apk add musl-locales Installs a limited set of locales (languages) for musl (C library) generated console messages.
▪ Listing defined locales is possible with locale -a
▪ cp /etc/profile.d/locale.sh /etc/profile.d/locale.sh.sh Copies the default locale settings. Then the
custom override file can be edited nano /etc/profile.d/locale.sh.sh.
▪ apk add lang Pulls in the translation packages of all installed packages.
▪ apk list hunspell* To list available hunspell dictionary packages.
▪ apk list *-xy *-xy-* To list translation packages for your specific (xy) language (for example, pt for Portuguese).

Miscellaneous
Some other miscellaneous things that might be useful:

basic tools
Alpine is a minimalist Linux distribution. If you expected a behavior like other Linux distributions, the similarity to them will be minimal at
best. Run:

# apk add sed attr dialog bash bash-completion grep util-linux pciutils usbutils binutils findutils re

$ export PAGER=less

Troubleshooting

I dont have permission to do anything in my user's home directory

By default the permissions of your new user(s) home directory may be limited to the root account, run one of these commands to change that:

# chmod 700 /home/<YourUsername>

or

# chmod 777 /home/<YourUsername>

See also

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▪ Installation
▪ Alpine newbie
▪ Comparison with other distros

Retrieved from "https://wiki.alpinelinux.org/w/index.php?title=Post_installation&oldid=21449"

This page was last edited on 6 January 2022, at 18:55.

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