Post Installation Recommendations
Now that your installation of Alpine Linux is up and running, you can start working with it. The following sections will provide a list of general recommendations to ease your interactive experience - they are all optional. The remaining sections will describe how to use (on a user level) various Alpine-native solutions, such as the package manager, firewall, and so on.
Creating a Normal User
Now that you are up and running, you will want a normal, non-root user to perform most daily tasks with.
You can either use the built-in busybox utility adduser, or the utility available in the shadow package named useradd.
Here are examples for creating a user (named "john" and "jane" respectively) using the utilities adduser and useradd respectively.
adduser -h /home/john -s /bin/ash john (1)| 1 | Both the -h /home/john and -s /bin/ash sections may be optional. However, it is recommended to specify both, as the defaults may not be desirable. |
useradd -m -U -s /bin/ash jane (1)| 1 | The options are, as in the previous example, optional. However, they are still highly recommended, as shown. |
Once your user has been created, if the utility you used has not asked you to set a password, you should do so now, using passwd foo, where "foo" is the username in question.
Granting Your User Administrative Access
Sometimes, you’ll want to do something that does require administrative powers.
While you may switch to a different tty and log in as root, this is often inconvenient.
You may gain root privileges ad-hoc using either the built-in busybox utility su, or the common external utility doas, available in the package named the same way.
doas, unlike su, will requires edditional configuration.
The difference between doas and su comes down to which side the permissions come from - su allows you to temporarily log-in as another user (and thus requires that you enter the password of the user you wish to log in as), while doas allows you to perform commands (including login shells) as the target user, assuming the configuration gives you that right (meaning that your password is the one used for authentication).
Here are examples on how to use su, and how to configure and use doas (in a shortened form) respectively:
su -l root (1)
su - (2)| 1 | -l means to run a login shell. |
| 2 | A mere - implies -l, and if no user is mentioned, root is implied - this is equivalent to the example in <1> |
apk add doas (1)
echo 'permit :wheel' > /etc/doas.d/doas.conf (2)
adduser joe wheel (3)
su -l joe (4)
doas command with arguments (5)| 1 | doas is not installed by default. |
| 2 | By default, doas only provides permissions to root. This translates as "people in the group wheel are allowed to perform any command, as any user, and any group." |
| 3 | The wheel group mentioned above is the common "administrator" group, and since we’re using it, we need to add our user to said group. |
| 4 | You may need to log out and log back in for the group listing to update. |
| 5 | This will run "command with arguments" as the default doas user - root. |
Getting a Graphical Environment
Most people will often want something more than just a raw tty. This section describes how to get a supported graphical interface, as well as some additional notes (for example, how to use a different type of GUI).
| You should not follow this if your system is intended to be used as a server, gateway, or similar device - those do not and should not require graphical interfaces. You can see the section acf if you absolutely require something more visual. |
To install a desktop environment (DE), you can run setup-desktop to interactively select and set up a desktop environment.
There are various DEs to choose from, for example GNOME, KDE Plasma, Xfce or MATE. Each of them has a different look and different goals. Take a look at them and choose the one you like.
The setup should install the desktop environment you want and start it automatically on boot. To start your desktop environment, reboot and log in with your user account.
| If this setup does not work or you have other problems, you can ask for help as usual via the official support channels. |