Do I need to run 'alpine-setup' after I first deploy my Alpine Linux Linode?
Linode
Linode Staff
I just created a new Alpine Linux Linode and it says:
You can setup the system with the command: setup-alpine
Do I need to do this? Do I need to setup persistence like I did when I was installing it on my own? How is your Alpine Linux distribution configured?
1 Reply
hphillips
Linode Staff
Do I need to run setup-alpine?
You do not need to run 'alpine-setup' unless you wish to reconfigure your keyboard layout, hostname, package-mirrors, networking configuration, disk layout, ntp server, or cron daemon. The out of the box defaults should work for most people.
Differences from the Default "Virtual" Setup
Our Alpine Linux distribution image comes preconfigured as close as possible to the distribution defaults. We use the "Virtual" distribution in what I believe to be "sys mode", so we would not need to setup "persistence" per se as would be required if you were setting up a live-usb installation.
We use a partition-less disk layout which contains the "/" and "/boot" paths together on the same ext4 filesystem. This differs from the Alpine Linux default installation which would partition your disk and create a "/" partition, a "/boot" partition, and a swap partition. A separate swap disk is used on our platform instead of a swap partition.
In addition to the defaults, we add the following additional packages to provide a consistent command set for troubleshooting across our distributions:
- sudo
- curl
- haveged
- iotop
- docs
- mtr
- nano
- sysstat
- vim
I hope this helps!