Intro

Recently i switched to Alpine Linux a Linux distro based on musl libc and busybox with focus on security and being lightweight.

This article will document the process of moving in from Void Linux to Alpine, how the uniqueness of using busybox for userland tooling was dealt with and how i got into contributing for it.

Coming from

My previous distro was Void Linux, which i used for as long as i contributed to it.

It is a very solid distro, updates are frequent, Repology counts between 86% to 89% of packages are updated.

The worst part of moving is that there wasn't anything technically wrong with the distro itself. If i had to pick a distro i knew would work just fine i would pick Void Linux.

But alas, other factors related to development and contribution sapped my fun out of contributing and i want to contribute to every distro i use in one way or another.

I picked Void because i wanted to contribute over it, initially over Alpine Linux, and went to Exherbo for a time and contributed to it. Now i pick Alpine.

Going to

First thing i did was to load up SysrescueCD on my DriveDroid and plug into my notebook.

I have been using SysrescueCD to install OSes from it with chroot with no problems for a long time, much before my long stay in Void, i remember installing Gentoo and Exherbo with it and i was super comfortable.

So i just picked up the Alpine chroot install guide from here. Pretty simple and straightforward. I did hit a hitch where it failed to load modules when i first generated the initramfs with mknitfs but i just did the following in the initramfs rescue environment

modprobe ext4
mount /dev/sda2 /sysroot
exit

And it continued as usual. I first installed whatever i could that i used from Void Linux into Alpine, turns out a few packages were missing like zola, wmutils, xidle, fd, fcount, sx and qimgv among others.

After installing everything i tried setting up my dotfiles only to hit a problem. Busybox's ln doesn't support the -r flag which sets up a relative symlink. Easy enough i just made it hardcoded, it is not like this decision will come back to bite me later.

I decided to drop hsetroot entirely and just use bgs for setting my wallpaper, but overall my scripts had no problem, at least visible, in getting to work with busybox.

One problem was gotop which wasn't available and didn't work with ps from busybox, it was worked around by installing the procps package.

Another was the lack of the shellcheck package which is behind the clusterfuck that is Haskell packaging.

Alpine seems very phobic to adding dependencies, so most stuff is compiled without pulseaudio support, thankfully i don't need much advanced features from pulseaudio for stuff like mpd so i just installed pulseaudio-alsa and alsa-plugins-pulse to get to work.

Also the fish package was outdated and without maintainer, so i adopted it and updated it.

On the bright side the /bin/sh of Alpine Linux is very similar to the one from Void Linux, which is dash, while Alpine's is the ash shell from busybox. Which means that all my scripts that relied purely on POSIX shell features + local worked just fine.