bones

[bones]

^ Yes, agreed. It's really quite nice. Packages are a simple 'apk add packagename' away. Boots very quickly. Uses grsecurity instead of that damn SELinux. There's a lot to like here. It seems I recall wux spending some time with Alpine in the past.

[GekkoP]

^ Nice scrot!
I also planned to play with Alpine but never get to it. (SELinux is on by default on Fedora, damn)

[bones]

You should definitely try it, gekko, I think you would appreciate it. I don't see spectrwm or cwm in their packages, so I might either build one or the other, or just go with evilwm or dwm, which they do have in the repos.

About
Alpine Linux is an independent, non-commercial, general purpose Linux distribution designed for power users who appreciate security, simplicity and resource efficiency.

Small
Alpine Linux is built around musl libc and busybox. This makes it smaller and more resource efficient than traditional GNU/Linux distributions. A container requires no more than 8 MB and a minimal installation to disk requires around 130 MB of storage. Not only do you get a fully-fledged Linux environment but a large selection of packages from the repository.

Binary packages are thinned out and split, giving you even more control over what you install, which in turn keeps your environment as small and efficient as possible.

Simple
Alpine Linux is a very simple distribution that will try to stay out of your way. It uses its own package manager called apk, the OpenRC init system, script driven set-ups and that’s it! This provides you with a simple, crystal-clear Linux environment without all the noise. You can then add on top of that just the packages you need for your project, so whether it’s building a home PVR, or an iSCSI storage controller, a wafer-thin mail server container, or a rock-solid embedded switch, nothing else will get in the way.

Secure
Alpine Linux was designed with security in mind. The kernel is patched with grsecurity/PaX out of the box, and all userland binaries are compiled as Position Independent Executables (PIE) with stack smashing protection. These proactive security features prevent exploitation of entire classes of zero-day and other vulnerabilities.

[wuxmedia]

Yeah, I did spend a bit of time trying to get the Xen alpine cd running VMs the way I wanted. Turned out it was more that I didn't really know what I was doing that made me fail, rather than alpine (the vm's actually worked fine, I was trying to put some controller gui on top)

I did see they actually had a few WM/DE in the repos, but never got round to it on anything but the server.
booted like lightning.
Might actually make Docker have some decently small containers, instead of a full debian install - just for a SMTP server or a software FW.
Hmm, something to play with.

[ivanovnegro]

Looks good Bones and seems an interesting project.

[rhowaldt]

thanks for sharing that, interesting. nice scrot, too :)

[simgin]

Hell yeah, Alpine gets some propaganda :)
I know that some large companies use Alpine for their internal TBX & Asterix communications/ systems.
But I keep failing an install :( But tbh , I haven't done one for a while, so this might be a revisit with some more experience :D
Thank you Bones for bringing it up!

cheers
Simon

[bones]

Still haven't broken Arch on the T61:

Arch, MATE, GreenLaguna theme, Numix-Square icons, Droid Sans font, blah, blah...

[bones]

Found "dark menu bar and Dock" in Mac OSX 10.10.3, haha. See! Macs are tweakable, hahaha...

[GekkoP]

^ The number of icons in that dock scares the hell out of me.

[bones]

^ Indeed! And those are the ones I actually use! ;)

[dkeg]

That's your work machine right? I could see that.

[bones]

^ This is the home machine, but definitely many of the same tools are used at work, plus some highly proprietary print industry workflow software.

[bones]

OK, got Plan9 (via 9front) working properly now. Seen working with memory, pstree, mothra (web browser), topng (for scrots), and theo, which prints out insults from Theo de Raadt. :D

[machinebacon]

^ pure fun, that's nice! The big question is: what's next? :D

(I would try to fix the /dev/audio thing, maybe it's something related to permissions?)

[bones]

^ Yes, my guess is that root can't do that, perhaps. Haven't created a user account yet.

What's next? TempleOS! (I kid, I kid.)

[ChefIronBelly]

Oh I like that bones :D and theo is a quote machine :)

[bones]

The big question is: what's next? :D

Returning to this, good question, really.

Mostly I'm poking around seeing what this OS can do. Man pages are my friend:

http://man.aiju.de/

I'm appreciating the simplicity and the fact that there's no X11 to deal with. Figuring out how to do the things I would do with any other OS.

[liknites]

I've read that some people use Acme as their Plan 9 wm, ditching rio altogether. I've never really got Plan 9 working with my hardware, it would install but always have some problem. I'd be interested in your assessment of Acme, 9fs, and the effectiveness of the attempt to move beyond Unix. Who knows, maybe the WMII devs weren't crazy to support 9P :)

btw, great posts bones!

[bones]

^ I haven't even delved into Acme, yet. Mostly just learning rc, figuring out the file system, and wrapping my brain around "distributed operating system." Gets rid of the "superuser," which I get, but takes... something... to get used to. So much of it makes perfect sense, it really seems to be "UNIX improved."

I was having a hard time wrapping my head around FTP-ing, (ftpfs), until I read this from ESR:

One of the examples from the Plan 9 survey paper is the way FTP access to remote sites is implemented. There is no ftp(1) command under Plan 9. Instead there is an ftpfs fileserver, and each FTP connection looks like a file system mount. ftpfs automatically translates open, read, and write commands on files and directories under the mount point into FTP protocol transactions. Thus, all ordinary file-handling tools such as ls(1), mv(1) and cp(1) simply work, both underneath the FTP mount point and across the boundaries with the rest of the user's view of the namespace. The only difference the user (or his scripts and programs) will notice is retrieval speed.

Mind. Blown.

I had problems the first time I tried to install it, too. I tried Plan9, 9front, and 9legacy, and failed at all three. Finally tried 9front again, with a completely wiped, unpartitioned drive, and got a successful installation.

At the end of the day, I'm not sure what the hell to do with it, other than play and poke around, but it is a refreshing change. I get that sort of giddy feeling of discovery that I first got when I sat down to a computer for the first time (Apple II) in 1977. :O Like bacon said, "pure fun."