Alpine in Raspberry PI 1 Model B

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#1 Mon, 2017-09-18 17:21
rigon
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I'm trying to install Alpine in a Raspberry PI 1 Model B. It has 256MB of RAM and the processor is Broadcom BCM2835.
I followed the instructions provided in the wiki, but I'm only able to boot with Alpine v3.1. Following versions (from 3.2 to 3.6) do not work at all. I've got the error of ACT led blinking 7 times.

I even tried the method provided in the end of the wiki page (update with apk upgrade and copy the kernel et al to the FAT32 partition), but it broke the boot.

Should this happen? As far as I can see, Raspberry PI 1 is still maintained, right? Is a special hack required to make it work?

Fri, 2017-10-06 16:31
rigon
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Finally, I make it work!!

As far as I can understand, this version of Raspberry PI cannot boot if the kernel is inside a folder...
If I move the files inside the boot folder to the partition's root and change the configuration accordingly, it can boot even with the latest version of Alpine.

The model I used was Raspberry PI 1 Model B with 256MB of RAM. It was one of the first Raspberry PIs to be released (Raspberry P1 2011.12 with SAMSUMG memory). Anybody knows if this is known behavior?

I wrote a post in my blog describing this issue and how to work around it: https://www.rigon.tk/documentation/alpine-raspberry-pi
PS: that page is being served by the Raspberry PI running Alpine, only with 22MB of used RAM!!

Wed, 2017-10-11 19:25
bazooka07
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Hello,
I have trying with success on my own raspberry.
Some remarks after that :
* At the first step, I have waiting for several minutes with a blank screen. So, I have unplug and plug again the power supply. And the screen have become more verbose.
* After doing setup-alpine, add the nano and sudo packages. Then add an user to the sudo group. It's required to connect through a ssh connection. Alpinelinux has no command usermod.
* Don't create a folder stage. Instead use the folder /mnt that exists.
* Using overlaytmpfs=yes doesn't work. Any change is lost after reboot. Don't use.

Thanks for your help.

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