Portable Alpine with X (run on varying hardware)
#1
Thu, 2016-08-18 17:49
mei737
-
- Offline
- 1 year 7 months ago
- 2016-08-18
Hello to everyone,
how good are the chances that a USB-stick with Alpine Linux and X installed runs on arbitrary hardware including X? Does anyone have ideas or experience? What is the best setup for maximal portability? Is it better to have only the VESA-driver (xf86-video-vesa) installed or all drivers (xf86-video-*) for example?
If you will run alpine on x86_64 hardware with Intel video - everything will be good (of course after simple setup of X).
If you will run alpine on i386 hardware with Intel video - everything will be good except web browsing. There are no normal-working browsers for i386. The better one is NetSurf but it is not Chrome/FF and some sites doesn't look good
If you will run alpine with video different from Intel - you will have lot of hardworking to install X-es correctly. Probably you are lucky guy, probably no...
Alpine on Raspberry pi works fine like a headless server (video output on my Raspberry is broken so I can't test X) and I didn't test yet another ARMHF devices.
Thank you very much for your answer. x86_64 would be fine. i386 and ARM are rather out of scope for me.
What kind of hardworking do you mean? Let's say we have a Linux-live-DVD or a Linux-installation-DVD (arbitrary distribution). Is something special done while creating it to make X work on such a DVD on varying hardware? Is it something that has to be included in packages or is it configuration? Can this also be done using Alpine Linux? Are there any principles of Alpine Linux that make this harder or impossible on Alpine Linux than on other distributions? Or is X simply not proven and tested enough by the Alpine-community?
kind of hardworking? Just try to install X for ATI video and you will see yourself. Black blank screen forever... if you are not familiar with X settings.
Wiki has very good and clear instructions for Intel and very poor set of instructions for everything else. If you will try to setup ATI (or something else) basing upon Intel's instruction and your own meaning how it should work... it will not work at all ))
Alpine installation tool is just set (or heap) of stand-alone packages for everything and there are no tools like Anaconda in Fedora or Debian Install. This is not BAD, just DIFFERENT KIND OF FUN in installation process. Part of this fun is "custom your video yourself and without any assistance of installation tool". Enjoy )))