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Well, I moved my main machine to Alpine Linux. I installed XFCE for now, to get a better sense of it.
Alpine seems to not automount USB drives, which was something that annoyed me to no end with FreeBSD... Maybe there is a way to do it, as I have a stack of backup drives that I need to work on...
I botched the XFCE install a little by screwing around with X a bit, so the login screen flashes for a second and disappears... It's still there and I can log in, but I can't see it.
The process was a bit hectic as I had a hellish night and am a bit fuzzy. But it seems to work, with only a minor loss of data from my old machine.
Jan 22 · 4 months ago
> Alpine seems to not automount USB drives, which was something that annoyed me to no end with FreeBSD... Maybe there is a way to do it, as I have a stack of backup drives that I need to work on...
You need to use eudev and gvfs for automount in Thunar to work. But if you have encrypted USB drives it might be problematic as eudev lacks some features from original udev.
Alternative is automounting script in mdev, it will mount drive without any prompt, tho (it should be possible to implement it somehow, but it will be problematic).
Yes automounting is "bloat" so you have to enable it yourself :)
Congrats on getting the initial setup done though. That's the biggest step.
The other suggestions were good, especially Thunar's automounter if you're using XFCE. You can also look at autofs which mounts drives upon access. As usual the Arch wiki has some examples: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Autofs
Not a bad choice. I'd say only Void or Slackware would be higher on my list if you're looking to avoid much of the cruft of today's distros.
@zetamacs: those were definitely up on my list; Alpine seemed like the best instant gratification distro - small, reliable and secure. After my stint with FreeBSD I didn't feel like screwing around too much.
Crap. I can see this is going to be death by papercuts. I think I will try Void Linux next, with glibc
@stack Yeah, good call. musl's great, but if "just work" is what you're after, that's not what you want.
Hah, I am writing this from Void linux :)
Isn't Alpine meant for containers? I can appreciate the novelty of using it as a desktop OS, but I stopped distro-hopping for a reason. This sounds like more of a headache than it's worth.
I admire your tenacity!
Yeah, Alpine was clearly the wrong choice -- I was just hoping I could get away with something very small and my requirements seem tiny...
But on a second thought, my requirements are not that small - a modern browser, tor, and it must work on a laptop... If only I could get off the mainweb...
At least you learned some things, and shared the results. So it's a net positive.
@Addison you'd be surprised at how well Alpine can work for people who run minimalist setups. See for instance https://drewdevault.com/2021/05/06/Praise-for-Alpine-Linux.html
That said I personally prefer NixOS both for configuration versioning and for easily rebuilding systems.
On FreeBSD, I just use DSBMC for automount.
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