Date: 2025-02-07

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 true is the opposite. The installation was easy with just regular
"setup-alpine" command. So I dd "aarch64 Rpi image" into USB/SD card.
Boot it and then ran regular setup-alpine script and installed Alpine
on the SSD disk. One "manual" thing was necessary for GUI to works.
That took me some time to figure it out. Without that, Wayland or Xorg
did not find screen or something like that.

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

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 shinny macbooks ;/

All works well as a desktop over a month 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.
Next time about that heroes.

----------------------------------------------------------------------

Less you have, more free you are.