alpine linux

alpine linux is a smol linux distro with a super fast package manager (apk)

install the docs metapackage to automatically download the documentation, or install the packages suffixed with -doc to install the documentation for a specific package

note that sometimes the -doc suffixed package is only for the main package. when you have a few packages with different configurations of the same software, for example emacs-x11 emacs-gtk3 etc share the emacs-doc package for their documentation (ew texinfo) which will not automatically get pulled in by docs

[2022-10-08 Sat]: this has been bothering me for like a year, i finally found the solution by accident today...

if its stuck with the default pointer and never changes (ie when hovering over text), you are probably missing a video driver. if using intel graphics, the package is xf86-video-intel

pulseaudio will eat the bell by default on alpine, causing the bell to be silent on terminals like xfce4-terminal that use it for beeping.

we can get a sound to play by with the module-x11-bell module and a sample by adding

### audible bell
load-sample-lazy x11-bell /usr/share/sounds/freedesktop/stereo/bell.oga
load-module module-x11-bell sample=x11-bell

to the relevant config file (ie /etc/pulse/default.pa) and restarting pulseaudio

alpine defaults to ext4 and having a swap partition, but this can be changed with some environment variables when running the installer

ROOTFS=btrfs SWAP_SIZE=0 setup-alpine