Date: 2025-02-07 Updated: 2025-03-19

Installing Alpine Linux on Raspberry Pi 5

As expected, Alpine Linux documention is just pure junk written by
someone from era of Commodore. If you check installation information
for Raspberry Pi there you may get an idea, that whole process is
pretty cucumber style with lot of manual steps.

The opposite is true. The installation was easy and fast with just
regular "setup-alpine" command as you would do on any other machine.
So I dd "aarch64 RPi image" into USB flash drive. Boot it and then ran
mentioned setup-alpine script and installed Alpine on the SSD disk.
One "manual" step was necessary to get into Wayland. That took me some
time to figure it out. Without that, Wayland or Xorg did not find
screen or something like that.

Create and add value to the /boot/usercfg.txt file:
dtoverlay=vc4-kms-v3d

I also added two lines, to disable wifi and bluetooth:
dtoverlay=disable-wifi
dtoverlay=disable-bt

Second thing I wanted, that if Rpi 5 is turned off, it does not eat
pointlessly 1,5 watts, so everything is completely off. To achieve
that one has to download official rpi-eeprom script from Raspberry
repository, run it and setup POWER_OFF_ON_HALT=1. It was not hard,
I had just to install some junk like Python and similar. Obviously
after the job, all can be removed. It would write data to those weird
files in /boot from Raspberry.
This setting can't be just added into usercfg.txt. File usercfg.txt
is how Alpine Linux handles options which normally go into config.txt.
This way setting is not overwritten when bootloader/kernel is upgraded.

Warning: Alpine Linux is still just Linux! The most energy wasted in
this distribution is around their mutilate infrastructure of Ubuntu
hosts, dockers and nobody really knows what everything else. In free
time they waste money on apps for their shiny MacBooks ;/

If one uses Linux, sooner or later something will stop working or some
packages can get replaced with more bloated alternatives and you can
end with additional dependencies, because somebody deeply lost in
a corporate propaganda decided that. The system is modular and more
fragile obviously. Many parts are glued together by many people.

All works well as a desktop for several months already for me. I got
Raspberry 5 with 8GB RAM + SSD Kit - 256 GB and active cooler. All
from Raspberry, not third party options.

The same time I ordered also Raspberry Pi 4, 2GB RAM for Plan 9.
Plan 9 was already replaced with Alpine Linux to get some life ;/
Next time about that dear heroes.

Less you have, more free you are.