I was looking for a lightweight operating system to host my dashboard and a few static movies/videos that I can play in the background and I landed on..
This tutorial is deprecated. I have to move from Alpine to Debian since Alpine doesn’t have native support for my NVIDIA graphics card.
Alpine
On Alpine download page, you can choose the Standard or the VM version. I used the VM version in this setup since I will be installing it in Proxmox. Standard will work, too. I am really not sure what is the difference, aside from the slimmed down kernel as stated in their WEBSITE.
Once installed login using:
1root
To proceed with the setup, type:
1setup-alpine
Follow the prompts. When it’s time to select a mirror, enable the community mirror, then select the fastest mirror.
i3wm
For basics, start with:
1setup-xorg-base
This is a convenient script that sets up the basic components required to run the X Window System (X11) on Alpine Linux
You can now add the apps that you need. For starters:
1apk add i3wm i3status alacritty xrandr feh dbus firefox font-dejavu thunar picom
- i3wm: the tiling window manager
- i3status: status bar generator for i3wm
- alacritty: cross-platform, GPU-accelerated terminal emulator
- xrandr: tool for managing screen resolutions, rotation, and multi-monitor setups on X11
- feh: tool for managing wallpapers
- dbus: message bus system for communication between applications and the system
- firefox: browser
- font-dejavu: commong font. The configuration will not work without this.
- thunar: XFCE based file manager
- picom: lightweight compositor for transparency, shadows, and VSync on X11
Enable dbus:
1rc-update add dbus
Guide I’m following - \
I added dmenu, i3lock, arandr, vim as well.
- arandr: is the GUI version of xrandr
Add exec i3 to .xinitrc file
startx to start
Reference
- Alpine Linux: Installation and Setup Guide for i3wm - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BRBuH-1dM3g
- i3wm: Jump Start (1/3) - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j1I63wGcvU4
- How to change IP in Alpine Linux - https://wiki.alpinelinux.org/wiki/Configure_Networking