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<title>Adventures in Creating a Minimal Alpine Linux Installer</title>
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<h1 id="adventures-in-creating-a-minimal-alpine-linux-installer">Adventures in Creating a Minimal Alpine Linux Installer</h1>
-
<p>2022-12-08</p>
-
<h2 id="introduction">Introduction</h2>
-
<p>I&#8217;ve made the switch to Alpine Linux as my main laptop&#47;desktop hybrid
workstation and I love it - warts and all. This post will follow my process building my Alpine Linux &#8220;installer&#8221; I used for this workstation, along with covering some bugs I found during my adventure.</p>
-
<p>My main goals when starting this project were to have a daily driver that was:</p>
-
<ul>
<li>free of any &#8220;real&#8221; desktop environment</li>
<li>Wayland based with SwayWM</li>
<li>as lightweight as possible</li>
</ul>
-
<p>Overall, I think I achieved what I was aiming for. After logging in (there is no login manager, you do it directly through the boot terminal) you will see:</p>
-
<p><img src="/public/images/alpine-1.jpg" alt="" /></p>
-
<p>(You can view the <a href="/public/images/alpine-1.jpg">full res image here</a>)</p>
-
<p>For reference this is running on a X260 ThinkPad with 16GB RAM, docked and connected to a 27&#8221; 4K monitor.</p>
-
<blockquote>
<p>If you&#8217;d prefer to just go straight to the installer, feel free to jump over to the project repo: <a href="https://git.sr.ht/~bt/alpine-linux-setup">https:&#47;&#47;git.sr.ht&#47;~bt&#47;alpine-linux-setup</a></p>
</blockquote>
-
<h2 id="getting-started">Getting Started</h2>
-
<p>My main reasoning for switching away from my previous setup (Garuda Linux running Sway) to Alpine was two fold:</p>
-
<ol>
<li>I wanted a more lightweight, less resource hungry system</li>
<li>I wanted to go as &#8220;full&#8221; Wayland as possible</li>
</ol>
-
<h3 id="benchmarks-comparisons">Benchmarks Comparisons</h3>
-
<p>I should mention that these are not official &#8220;benchmark&#8221; applications or proper testing. I merely reproduced the same tasks, using the same applications, for the same amount of time and compared the usage. Just keep that in mind!</p>
-
<ul>
-<li><p><strong>Garuda Linux</strong></p>
-
+<li><strong>Garuda Linux</strong>
<ul>
<li>SwayWM</li>
<li>Firefox: 9 tabs (Figma included)</li>
@@ -69,8 +53,7 @@ workstation and I love it - warts and all. This post will follow my process buil
<li>Sublime Text: single project open</li>
<li><strong>Memory usage (range): 6.0-7.2 GB</strong></li>
</ul></li>
-<li><p><strong>Alpine Linux</strong></p>
-
+<li><strong>Alpine Linux</strong>
<ul>
<li>SwayWM</li>
<li>Firefox: 9 tabs (Figma included)</li>
@@ -80,23 +63,14 @@ workstation and I love it - warts and all. This post will follow my process buil
<li><strong>Memory usage (range): 1.0-3.5 GB</strong></li>
</ul></li>
</ul>
-
<p>Switching over has basically cut my system memory usage <strong>in half</strong>. That ended up being a much better improvement than I predicted. These are beyond just numbers too - the system <em>feels</em> snappier.</p>
-
<p>So, from a speed and usability stand point I considered this a success already.</p>
-
<h2 id="crashes-roadblocks">Crashes &#38; Roadblocks</h2>
-
<p>Of course, things didn&#8217;t run 100% flawlessly out-of-the-box. There were some pretty annoying <strong>crashes</strong> and issues.</p>
-
<h3 id="greetings-tty">Greetings, tty</h3>
-
<p>After installing <code>tut</code> I started walking through its guided setup. Once it prompted me to login via browser in order to authenticate, I clicked the link provided in the terminal. I was immediately thrown out of my session and into <code>tty</code>. Awesome.</p>
-
<p>I&#8217;ll save you both the headache and large amount of time I wasted on this silly &#8220;bug&#8221; and just say it had to do with my user settings trying to launch &#8220;Chromium&#8221; as my default browser. I normally set qutebrowser as much default, so this was a change I needed to make anyway.</p>
-
<p>I put the following in my <code>&#47;etc&#47;xdg&#47;mimeapps.list</code> (which is included by default with the installer)</p>
-
<pre><code>[Default Applications]
x-scheme-handler&#47;http=org.qutebrowser.qutebrowser.desktop
x-scheme-handler&#47;https=org.qutebrowser.qutebrowser.desktop
@@ -126,49 +100,29 @@ application&#47;pcx=feh.desktop
image&#47;svg+xml=feh.desktop
image&#47;svg-xml=feh.desktop
</code></pre>
-
<p>You might have also noticed that I use <code>feh</code> as my default image viewer as well. That&#8217;s just my personal preference, feel free to switch that out as you see fit.</p>
-
<p><strong>Sidenote:</strong> Chromium now runs perfectly fine since the original crashes. I have no clue how or why. Wayland black magic, I assume? Maybe I installed a package that helped or an update occurred. <em>Shrug</em></p>
-
<h3 id="screen-sharing">Screen Sharing</h3>
-
<p>This has been a complete failure for me. I&#8217;ve tried both the Chromium and Firefox <a href="https://lr.vern.cc/r/swaywm/comments/l4e55v/guide_how_to_screenshare_from_chromiumfirefox/">implementations of these &#8220;hacks&#8221;</a> but neither work. For now I will fallback to my Garuda Linux OS boot and share my screen there. It&#8217;s a silly workaround but I hardly ever need to &#8220;show my screen&#8221; in any capacity as is.</p>
-
<p>I can live without this for now. (Please <a href="https://lists.sr.ht/~bt/public-inbox">leave a message in my personal inbox</a> if you know of another workaround for this!)</p>
-
<h2 id="some-minor-tweaks">Some Minor Tweaks</h2>
-
<p>Some of these &#8220;hacks&#8221; or tweaks I had to implement might help others who run into similar issues when setting up their own Alpine desktops.</p>
-
<h3 id="aerc-mail">aerc-mail</h3>
-
<p>It is important to install <code>gawk</code> since <code>awk</code> isn&#8217;t &#8220;real&#8221; on Alpine. Once you have that on you system <code>aerc</code> will render emails out-of-the-box.[^1]</p>
-
<pre><code>apk add gawk
</code></pre>
-
<h3 id="sublime-text">Sublime Text</h3>
-
<p>Sublime Text requires flatpak, so if that isn&#8217;t your <em>thing</em> then you&#8217;re better off snagging a different editor. I&#8217;ve tried multiple times throughout my career to use an alternate editor (preferably 100% open source) but keep finding myself returning to Sublime. Maybe one day&#8230;</p>
-
<pre><code>apk add flatpak
flatpak remote-add --if-not-exists flathub https:&#47;&#47;flathub.org&#47;repo&#47;flathub.flatpakrepo
</code></pre>
-
<p>Then reboot your machine for the changes to take. Login again and run:</p>
-
<pre><code>flatpak install flathub com.sublimetext.three
</code></pre>
-
<p>FYI: You <em>might</em> need to run the above commands under <code>sudo</code> if your current user lacks proper permissions.</p>
-
<h3 id="cursors">Cursors</h3>
-
<p>This was an odd edge case. For the most part, the default system cursors worked out of the box. Then I installed Firefox. That caused me to go down a rabbit-hole of (still open) tickets referencing poor cursor rendering for Wayland Firefox. Apparently some users even have their cursors disappear completely!</p>
-
<p>Not to worry though - there is an easy fix!</p>
-
<ol>
<li>Install <a href="https://github.com/keeferrourke/capitaine-cursors">capitaine cursors</a>:
apk add capitaine-cursors</li>
@@ -179,15 +133,10 @@ sudo cp -r &#47;usr&#47;share&#47;icons&#47;capitaine-cursors-dark ~&#47;.icons&
<li>The make your cursor changes using <code>gnome-tweaks</code></li>
<li>Profit!</li>
</ol>
-
<h2 id="closing-thoughts">Closing Thoughts</h2>
-
<p>Overall I&#8217;m decently satisfied with my &#8220;installer&#8221;. I&#8217;ve included <em>just enough</em> packages to hit the ground running when using this on new hardware or even needing to recover existing devices. This project certainly won&#8217;t cover the needs of all users, but my hope is that others can always fork their own and give it a spin! (Please do report any bugs or issues as you come across them!)</p>
-
<p>Alpine Linux can be more than just a &#8220;server distro&#8221;. My daily driver proves it!</p>
-
<h2 id="refs">Refs</h2>
-
<ol>
<li>This is now included in my official installer script, but I originally had to install this manually.</li>
</ol>