If you’re anything like me you hate installing software and operating systems. A lot of the process includes arbitrary steps you do very infrequently to be able to recall properly, or maybe arcane knowledge about a particular software or hardware system that you have to know or it won’t work. Beyond that it can be tedious and keeps you from the real work or project you’d like to get to. Even Linus Torvalds doesn’t like it.

This is a short guide I wrote a while ago on how to install and configure alpine linux on a raspberry pi zero w. It’s similar in purpose to my guide on void linux for the raspberry pi 3b+. It’s designed to walk you through some basic configuration if you’re new to linux or alpine. By the end you’ll be able to ssh to a basic user to do whatever you need.

1. Ingredients List

   • Raspberry Pi Zero W
   • Microsd Card
   • (Optional) my setup script

2. Write the image to your sdcard and install unpack alpine to your pi

   • Use my script if you want, but make sure to change PIDRIVE to your sdcard device (lsblk to find your card device) and IMGVER and IMGREV to the latest values (as of this writing change IMGVER->‘3.12’ and IMGREV->‘0’ .
   • Otherwise you can download the armhf image and install manually

3. Insert the microsd card, hook the pi up, and turn it on

   • Login as ‘root’ (password is empty)
   • The default login shell is ash

4. Basic configuration

   • Run the setup wizard
     • setup-alpine
   • This wizard will set up the keyboard, hostname, internet connection, ntpd, and other stuff
     • I had a problem with the busybox ntp daemon, so I left the default ntp daemon option (chrony)
   • Add a few basic packages (rng, man, vim, bash, sudo)
     • apk update && apk upgrade
     • apk add rng-tools man vim bash sudo
   • rng service configuration (this fixes dhpc issues that occur on reboot) this guide was helpful
     • service rngd start
     • rc-update add rngd boot
     • rc-update add wpa_supplicant boot
     • rc-update del networking boot
     • rc-update -u
   • The wizard should enable the sshd service automatically (assuming you enabled network access), but by default the root user can’t be ssh to with a password.
     • For ssh you can either edit ‘/etc/ssh/sshd_config’ (to enable root ssh) or add a new user.
     • I elected for the latter approach because I try to minimize using root, even on embedded systems.

5. Create a standard user

   • Alpine uses its own adduser and addgroup commands, which work a little differently from the useradd and groupadd that I’m more familiar with.
   • Create a standard user called with a bash login shell, membership to wheel and users groups, and a password:
     • adduser -S <user> -h /home/<user> -s /bin/bash -G wheel
     • addgroup <user> users
     • lbu include /home/<user>
     • passwd <user>
   • Add wheel to sudoers to give standard user sudo ability
     • visudo
     • uncomment line (remove #): %wheel ALL=(ALL) ALL
   • commit changes and reboot
     • lbu commit -d
     • reboot

6. Client SSH conveniences (Optional)

   • Go to the terminal on your client (remote) machine
   • Get your pi LAN ip address
     • You could have got this during setup-alpine when dhcp was set up
     • If not you can get it with sudo arp-scan -l
   • Add the pi hostname to your client machine ‘/etc/hosts’ file
     • sudo vim /etc/hosts <host_ip>
   • Add your default key to be used as authentication (if you don’t have one, generate a keypair with ssh-keygen)
     • ssh-copy-id <user>@<host>
   • Test ssh connection
     • ssh <user>@<host>

7. Configure the standard user

   • Connect to pi from client
     • ssh <user>@<host>
   • Create an empty .profile file
     • touch .profile
   • (Optional) Add whatever you want to your .profile
     • vim .profile
   • Symlink .bash_profile and .zprofile to .profile
     • ln -s .profile .bash_profile
     • ln -s .profile .zprofile