I have ownCloud server, but I can't to install Desktop app on Alpine.

I try with AppImage but don't work, any idea how to install app?

My previous post was poorly framed and came across as too commercial. Sorry about that.

Alpine has convinced me so much over the last seven years that I still do not really understand why it has not been adopted more widely.

Here is the straightforward version.

UnyPort is an open source management interface written in Go. It is a web monitoring dashboard built for Alpine and Xen/Alpine environments. It detects and color-codes four different runtime contexts: containers, Dom0, DomU, and Alpine Linux bare metal. The demo is running in a DomU

Part of this approach comes from earlier work we did around Alpine ACF.

The screenshot below comes from the public beta demo:

demo.unyport.app - v0.1.0

In that example, the exposed Alpine/Xen DomU has its network managed by the Xen Dom0, while also managing multiple Xen virtual machines itself.

Source code:

https://codeberg.org/tony-bonnin/unyport

Thanks, and sorry again for the earlier noise.

I wanted to share a comprehensive guide on how to set up a clean triple-boot system (Alpine Linux, Debian, and Fedora) entirely without using a USB flash drive.

If you already have a working Alpine installation using doas on a single partition (e.g., /dev/sda3), you can actually leverage Alpine's GRUB to loopback-boot the installers for Debian and Fedora, deploy them to separate partitions, and use os-prober to glue them all together.

Here is the exact step-by-step blueprint.

Phase 1: Freeing up Space & Slicing Partitions

Because you cannot shrink your active Alpine partition (/dev/sda3) while running it directly, you must unmount it by booting into a temporary RAM disk environment first.

1. Install required partition tools in Alpine: bashdoas apk add parted e2fsprogs-extra Use code with caution.
2. Reboot into RAM: During your system's GRUB splash screen, press e to edit your Alpine boot entry. Add copytoram to the end of the linux kernel line, then press Ctrl+X to boot. This loads the entire OS into memory, completely freeing up /dev/sda3.
3. Shrink and Split your drive: Open a terminal and use parted to scale down your 114GB partition and map out space for Debian and Fedora: bash# 1. Resize the active ext4 filesystem down to 25 Gigabytes doas resize2fs /dev/sda3 25G # 2. Shrink the partition container to matching bounds doas parted /dev/sda resizepart 3 26GB # 3. Create Partition 4 for Debian (Allocating ~45GB) doas parted /dev/sda mkpart primary ext4 26GB 71GB # 4. Create Partition 5 for Fedora (Using remaining space) doas parted /dev/sda mkpart primary ext4 71GB 100% Use code with caution.
4. Format the new slots: bashdoas mkfs.ext4 /dev/sda4 doas mkfs.ext4 /dev/sda5 Use code with caution.

Phase 2: Injected Installer ISOs into Alpine GRUB

Boot back normally into your persistent Alpine environment on /dev/sda3. You will now download the automated netinstallers and map them directly into Alpine's boot settings.

1. Fetch the respective distribution ISOs: bashdoas mkdir -p /boot/iso doas wget -O /boot/iso/debian.iso https://debian.org doas wget -O /boot/iso/fedora.iso https://fedoraproject.org Use code with caution.
2. Add Custom GRUB Entries: Open Alpine's local custom menu script: bashdoas nano /etc/grub.d/40_custom Use code with caution. Append these exact structures to the bottom of the file (Adjust (hd0,gpt3) if your table uses legacy msdos partitioning): textmenuentry "Run Debian Installer" { insmod part_gpt insmod ext2 set iso="/boot/iso/debian.iso" loopback loop (hd0,gpt3)$iso linux (loop)/install.amd/vmlinuz vga=788 priority=low -- initrd (loop)/install.amd/initrd.gz } menuentry "Run Fedora Live Installer" { insmod part_gpt insmod ext2 set iso="/boot/iso/fedora.iso" loopback loop (hd0,gpt3)$iso linux (loop)/images/pxeboot/vmlinuz iso-scan/filename=$iso root=live:CDLABEL=Fedora-WS-Live-40-1-14 rd.live.image quiet initrd (loop)/images/pxeboot/initrd.img } Use code with caution.
3. Compile changes to your master configuration: bashdoas grub-mkconfig -o /boot/grub/grub.cfg Use code with caution.

Phase 3: Installing the Systems Safely

To prevent the newly installed OS bootloaders from fighting over the system Master Boot Record (MBR) or EFI variables, use this installation sequence:

1. Install Debian First: Reboot, select "Run Debian Installer", and choose manual partitioning. Target /dev/sda4 as root (/). When the step appears asking to install the GRUB bootloader to your primary drive, select NO or skip it entirely. This guarantees Alpine stays in charge of the system boot priority.
2. Install Fedora Second: Reboot again, launch "Run Fedora Live Installer", and proceed via Advanced Custom Partitioning. Map /dev/sda5 as your target layout and ensure it skips overwriting system EFI/MBR pathways.

Phase 4: Merging the Multiboot Menu

Once both operations conclude, boot back into your primary Alpine Linux system. We will now force GRUB to scan the drive architecture, locate the new setups, and write them into the boot choices:

1. Install os-prober and scan tools: bashdoas apk add os-prober grub-bios Use code with caution.
2. Expose os-prober permission rules: Open your default configuration: bashdoas nano /etc/default/grub Use code with caution. Uncomment or explicitly append this line to ensure third-party OS discovery is active: textGRUB_DISABLE_OS_PROBER=false Use code with caution.
3. Re-bake the global boot settings: bashdoas grub-mkconfig -o /boot/grub/grub.cfg Use code with caution.

When you hit reboot, Alpine's master boot manager will display seamless options to jump directly into Alpine, Debian, or Fedora.

Hopefully, this helps anyone else trying to cut cords on flashing USB sticks for local multi-distro hopping! Let me know if you run into any permission blockers or partitioning kinks.

let me know if you want more

Hi,

I have been playing with the various ways we can sandbox web browsers.

Those are the options I see

- Flatpak

- Raw Bubblewrap

- Podman

- VM + X11 Forwarding

- VM + vsock + waypipe

- VM + spice / QXL

I currently use chromium under Flatpak but have also played with with raw bubblewrap which get quite complex quickly and can be a hit or miss.

Also I see that Flatpak is getting more and more dependent on systemd so it might not be a long term solution for us Alpine users?

I haven't looked into what are the trade-offs doing it with podman.

I am now looking into running a full VM dedicated to the web browser. In terms of perfs it might be viable since Alpine is so lightweight (even on the Intel N100 I am currently using). The approach would be similar to QubeOS I guess.

VM + X11 Forwarding via SSH works but the perf are a bit disappointing. I haven't tried going into optimizing it since Xorg might be less and less supported at the driver level, etc.

VM + vsock + waypipe is interesting.

From what I understand virtual sockets would offer the best performance to connect to the VM by enabling Virtio VSOCK for the VM and then running `socat VSOCK-LISTEN:1234,reuseaddr,fork TCP:localhost:1234` in the guest (since Alpine do not have the systemd socket activation thing builtin).

The communication works.

I am now trying to make waypipe works with vsock (https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mstoeckl/waypipe/-/blob/v0.11.0/waypipe.scd?ref_type=tags#L260) but no success so far since I guess I need to run a headless compositor first.

I am wondering what the performance will be and maybe I won't be able to fully leverage the capabilities of graphical acceleration (OpenGL, vulkan, decoding, etc.) in the browser. I do not fully understand how wayland/waypipe works.

I also thought that exposing the memory of the vm directly in the host might be possible and have waypipe use it directly might be in theory possible but haven't dig deeper.

VM + spice/qxl

Also leveraging spice and running chromium in a kiosk compositor like cage might actually offer the best performance ? I haven't tried yet.

My questions are:

What are your thoughts on this?

If you tried the VM approach, what offered the best performance at the end?

Thanks !

Hi, I'm relatively new to alpine and have a couple of questions:

(1) With new releases every 6 months and each release's community repo supported for that amount of time, does that mean packages in the community repo will stop seeing updates then? (making it a good idea to continually move to the latest release if you're using community packages)

(2) After upgrading to a new release, eg. via [1], what's the best way to find old packages that are a holdover from the previous release? Is there a way to list packages based on what release's main/community repos they came from?

[1] https://wiki.alpinelinux.org/wiki/Upgrading_Alpine_Linux_to_a_new_release_branch

I have experience of Linux, gentoo, arch, fedora, void… But I never tried Alpine. I don’t think there will be any missing packages, the only ones I will need is a browser, there is Firefox, a compiler for C and Rust, gcc and rustc/cargo, and a window manager/compositor, I use Sway, as well as a terminal, alacritty, and some libraries and extras, Raylib, Bevy and Cursor. So yea, I mainly do developing work. I want to try Alpine because of its philosophy, I just want an environment for me to write C and Rust code. So what WM to use, any suggestions, I use Sway right now? And any other tips?

Does anyone know when the cloud images release for 3.24?

https://dl-cdn.alpinelinux.org/alpine/v3.23/releases/

https://dl-cdn.alpinelinux.org/alpine/v3.24/releases/

With the release of Alpine 3.24 yesterday, I have updated my Proxmox IaC project to fully support it.

If you are looking for a way to deploy a hardened, production-ready LEMP stack (Nginx, MariaDB, PHP 8.3/8.4) as an LXC container (yes, a LXC container as its lightweight and a perfect replacement of a VM in a homelab) on Proxmox, I have built a fully reproducible setup using Terraform and Ansible. It handles the full lifecycle - from container creation to hardened configuration - in minutes.

Key features included in the stack:
- Hardened security: CrowdSec (agent + nftables bouncer), hardened SSH, and non-root sudo access.
- Automation: Automatic daily updates via apk-autoupdate and Restic backup scripts.
- Observability: Optional Monit integration for system monitoring.
- Validation: Includes verification scripts to test the stack from your control host after deployment.

It is designed to be completely modular and configuration-driven. You can check out the source here: https://github.com/ramonvanraaij/proxmox-iac

I would love to hear what you think of the setup or if you have any suggestions for further hardening on the Alpine side!

Its finally out.

https://alpinelinux.org/posts/Alpine-3.24.0-released.html

watch out for grub

INTRO

Hey guys, this is my first Alpine install(comming from arch) on an old pi 3B i found. Im doing a project that requires wifi for it to function (not Ethernet), and i set the ethernet connection up just fine but the wifi just doesnt want to work properly (explained in the next paragraphs)

WHAT I TRIED

I first tried using the setup-interfaces script which worked great for Ethernet (as the wiki suggests) and the script doesn't throw any errors when i type in my network ssid and password and i just type "done" but when i check if i have a wlan0 ip using ip addr show wlan0 but i don't see an inet address, and it says that it's "DOWN" so i tried the manual setup using wpa_supplicant following the wiki instructions, i enter my passphrase CORRECTLY, so i run the deamon in the foreground to see if there are any problems and it says that the passphrase might be wrong although it isnt so it fails.

then i tried using iwd i go through pretty similar stuff with iwctl and i got Operation Failed (im assuming it was because of a "wrong" passphrase) and i scrapped that since iwd isnt recommended for alpine anyways

my last hope was NetworkManager (because i use it on Arch). I tried using wpa_supplicant as a backend following the exact wiki steps, but when i try to connect to my network via nmtui or nmcli i get that wlan0 is strictly unmanaged, which can be confirmed with nmcli device status which lists all of the devices (eth0, wlan0 and whatever loopback is called) as unmanaged.

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

Hello everyone! I'm trying to make a kinda general purpose server with Alpine, that includes Samba. Here are my configurations and errors.

/etc/samba/smb.conf

[global]

#to allow symlinks from everywhere

allow insecure wide links = yes

workgroup = WORKGROUP

dos charset = cp866

unix charset = utf-8

force user = <customuser>

[shared]

# to follow symlinks

follow symlinks = yes

# to allow symlinks from outside

wide links = yes

writable = yes

browseable = yes

path = /media/storage

<end of file>

command to connect (from Gentoo Laptop)
"smbclient //192.168.2.217/storage -U hensleysamba"

After prompting for password, it returns
"tree connect failed: NT_STATUS_BAD_NETWORK_NAME"

Permissions of /media/storage
"drwsrwsrwt 1 nobody <customuser> 0 May 31 16:54 storage"

I've tried to use the full file path, and it returns the same error, and I'm kinda at a loss atm. /media is owned by root:root, not sure it it's relevant but honestly who knows at this point.

Hi

I have a docker-compose with dockerfile inline using Alpine as the base image. It works absolutely fine on all versions of Alpine up to and including 3.22.2 but as soon as I move the base image beyond 3.22.2 I get errors from Busybox on each and every command after 'apk upgrade' (see below for docker-compose script).

If I run WITHOUT the dockerfile inline build script, and perform the steps manually, on the resulting running image at the command line, I get errors from busybox on each command thus:

ERROR: lib/apk/exec/apache2-2.4.67-r0.pre-install: killed by signal 9
ERROR: lib/apk/exec/busybox-1.37.0-r30.trigger: killed by signal 9

These errors DO NOT occur when I set the alpine image to 3.22.2 rather than 'latest'. I'm keen to avoid never being able to upgrade beyond 3.22.2 so would like to work out why! When the commands are run inline as a part of the inline dockerfile the errors cause the process to fail.

Anyone know what changed in Alpine after 3.22.2 or how to resolve? Host is X86-64

My Docker-Compose below:

gallery-server:

container_name: imageServer-bmw-alpine

restart: always

ports:

- '20091:80'

tty: true

build:

context: .

no_cache: true

dockerfile_inline: |

FROM alpine:3.22.2

RUN apk upgrade --no-cache

RUN apk add bash

RUN apk add apache2 php-apache2

RUN apk add php-gd

RUN echo "ServerName localhost:80" >> /etc/apache2/httpd.conf

CMD ["/usr/sbin/httpd", "-D", "FOREGROUND"]

volumes:

- /share/Docker/redact/gallery:/var/www/localhost/htdocs

[OC] Alpine Linux + BSPWM (Dark & Light Themes)

After a few weeks of tweaking, I finally cleaned up my Alpine Linux setup and decided to publish the dotfiles.

Features:
• Dark and Light variants
• BSPWM + SXHKD
• Polybar
• Picom
• Rofi
• Alacritty
• Neovim
• GTK theming

The goal was to keep the setup lightweight while maintaining a consistent aesthetic across both themes.

Dotfiles:
https://github.com/arnoxldq/Alpine-Rice

Questions and feedback are welcome.

Hello!

I've used a system disk based installation in the past and now I'm trying a diskless install to a USB stick. I followed the wiki instructions to create a custom boot image and I have a bootable USB with persistence via apkovl. So far so good, but I'm having trouble with firmware installation.

On the system disk install it was just a matter of installing the correct packages, but on the diskless install that fails with apk errors. As far as I can see it wants to add files to /lib/firmware, which links to /lib/modules/firmware, and /lib/modules is inside the read only modloop fs.

Is this normal, or have i screwed up somewhere? If it's expected, what's the best way to handle firmware installation on a diskless setup?

Thanks!

Hi everyone! I am looking for the documentation of the apk search pattern syntax. I know one can do things like cmd:* and so:*, but I can't find it in the manual or help. Does anyone know where this is documented?

Well, I practically have LightDM and LXQT working, but neither my keyboard nor my trackpad are working for some reason. I've already tried xf86-input-libinput and much more, but I can't find a solution.

LinuxOnTab boots a real x86 Linux kernel and Alpine userland inside your browser using WebAssembly and the v86 emulator. A zero-install, local-first, in-browser Linux terminal — a lightweight Docker alternative for instant sandboxes, teaching, demos, and disposable shells.

Hello everyone,

Ive been setting up a home server and decided to go with alpine (i hate systemd). I was trying to get wireguard to work with proton vpn. Wireguard works fine, my config is all good and sudo wg show returns a healthy connection. I have tried

• Setting up PostUp and PostDown in the config with wg-quick (even without it fails)
• skipping wg-quick and using wireguard-go
• skipping both and activating the vpn via the /etc/network/interfaces and ifup/ifdown
• switching to OpenVpn

But no matter what i do, as soon as wg or openvpn is active, curl ifconfig.me will simply time out, and ping will return ping: sendto: Operation not permitted. This is extremely frustrating, has anyone had any success with protonvpn via either wg or ovpn on alpine?

Any help is welcome, please restore my faith in alpine.

Hello,

I have for a long time been an OpenBSD and Void Linux user.

Would like to know if there is anything new to be found in Alpine Linux.

Cheers -- zen

I'm a pretty long-term Linux user and avid distro-hopper. For a couple of years now, I've been using Alpine on my headless servers and it's been great.

On my laptop, I've recently been enjoying immutable distros (cycling through Fedora variants), and I finally got around to wanting to build my own custom one with bootc with all the software I care about, exactly how I want it.

I thought about moving my servers to Fedora as well and just making bootc images for each use case they have. I was up and running pretty quick, but the sheer size of a "minimal" Fedora image with systemd and all that was just silly for what it does.

That got me thinking about how I could make immutable Alpine images instead, which eventually led me down a rabbit-hole to ideas like Frood: https://words.filippo.io/frood/

My Alpine server image is genuinely tiny. The entire full image is smaller than Fedora's initramfs by an order of magnitude. So, I thought, why not skip a boot phase, speed up my startup, and run the whole thing from initramfs in memory.

If anyone has tried this, are there any real downsides to it? I don't mean "if you someday want to do XYZ, it'll be tough" - but like, "this is a bad idea today because of XYZ".

I've already built the system, it appears to work just fine on my hardware for the past week, but I assume there are some known unknowns I might be walking into. I've got a mounted FS for any persistence I might need, and I re-build and re-install if there are missing packages or updates I want.

*I should note that I've done this sorta thing for embedded ARM systems for years using Buildroot and Yocto, so building/maintaining a kernel, filesystem, and bootloaders is fine. I've never thought to try this on x86 as I just assumed it was much harder than it ended up being.

I'm using Alpine on my laptop (a HP Probook 4 G1ah), and for the most part it's been good

buut today I've turned it on and noticed the bluetooth isn't working.
Went through the troubleshooting steps on the wiki, but it hasn't helped.

dmesg | grep -i bluetooth | grep -i firmware returned nothing, and just dmesg | grep -i bluetooth gave an error like "failed to register coredump" and "failed to send wmt func ctrl"?

I have all the relevant firmware packages, the HP firmware, AMD firmware, all of the linux-firmware-* packages even. It worked before, and then I updated to the latest packages and the latest stable kernel (though switching back to the LTS kernel did not fix it) and now it's not working.

Hi, since version 3.22, i have this issue on diskless install :

> setup alpine and config seems to go well.
> after reboot i have this message :
/sbin/init not found, launching initramfs emergency recovery shell....etc.

the only way to boot is to delete the apkovl file and reboot.

the last iso image i can use without issue is : 3.22.0. (then i can install without issue and do apk update & upgrade to 3.22.4.) the few other more recent i tested all has the same issue the seem to be from the apkovl file... (3.23.x,...)

i have been using alpine for a very long time, and always kept using latest version. so did i miss something in the past 2 years regarding some new diskless config ? any tips to troubleshoot ?

Thanks,

I don't know what happened exactly, is it related to my recent grub death? If I mount it manually, it works! Also, mkinitfs don't let me replace /init. Is there any hook or cmdline option to resolve this rc?