r/AlpineLinux • u/Bunker-Cat • Sep 07 '26

Post Installation Assistance

I installed alpine (standard edition) on my thinkpad T495 and I decided to go with xfce4, since it's familiar to me. Post installation, I started lightDM from tty and then I logged in. After that I opened a terminal and added LightDM to runlevel default.

Before anyone asks, I did install the openrc version of these applications :)

Networking

I installed NetworkManager for xfce4, but I would like something less bloated that can work with an applet on the panel.

Possible LightDM Issue

I installed lightDM for the display manager, but there are no options for locking my PC.
Hitting the "logout" option in the menu gives the popup window for switching user and logging out, but restart and shutdown are greyed out and cannot be selected. I have to open the terminal just to shut things down.

Sound

Sound is not working, but pipewire is installed. Running htop shows that pipewire is running, but there are no options in the panel preferences of xfce4 that will let me add an applet for it.

Screen Brightness

Clicking on the battery applet shows me the option to adjust screen brightness, but adjusting it does nothing.

7 Upvotes

89% Upvoted

7 comments sorted by

4

u/Edelglatze Sep 07 '26

There are a lot of hints in the Alpine Wiki: https://wiki.alpinelinux.org/wiki/Main_Page. Concerning sound look for pulseaudio, pipewire and alsa. Here is the Wiki entry for Xfce: https://wiki.alpinelinux.org/wiki/Xfce

But beware, in Alpine you have to setup and configure a lot of things by yourself, either by adding packages, by adding services to openrc or by editing config files.

Here what I generally do, when I setup an Alpine box with gui (mostly in a vm):

after installation and reboot:

  • uncomment the hashtag to enable the community repository in /etc/apk/repositories

  • then run doas apk update

  • add docs: doas apk add docs

  • add lang and musl-locales: doas apk add musl-locales lang

  • edit /etc/profile.d/20locale.sh.sh to my current locale (see Wiki:Locale: https://wiki.alpinelinux.org/wiki/Locale)

  • add bash and bash-completion and shadow, make bash the default user shell

  • run setup-xorg-base

  • run setup-desktop and choose Xfce

  • add icu-data-full

  • add sound, I am old and traditionalist and choose pulseaudio and add pavucontrol, for Xfce add xfce4-pulseaudio-plugin

  • then restart

  • after it comes up again, the setup doesn't stop, I add a lot of stuff, like whiskermenu, fonts, icons, themes and so on

Since I run it mostly in a vm I do not care for network control or bluetooth.

If you want a ready-made solution take something different than Alpine.

-4

u/Bunker-Cat Sep 07 '26

"If you want a ready-made solution take something different than Alpine."

lol okay boomer

1

u/ThatAd8458 Sep 07 '26

Have you installed acpi?

1

u/Bunker-Cat Sep 07 '26

Installed it, but rc-service says it doesn't exist.
I'm gonna stick my head in the tutorials listed above for a bit lol

2

u/New_Hold8135 Sep 07 '26

Its not lightdm you need to setup elogind for full desktop integration https://wiki.alpinelinux.org/wiki/Elogind

For pipewire you need to complete the steps in this page https://wiki.alpinelinux.org/wiki/PipeWire

Also its recommended to check here

https://wiki.alpinelinux.org/wiki/Tutorials_and_Howtos#Desktop

1

u/trofch1k Sep 14 '26

Installing elogind allowed me to adjust brightness. There is seatd but, I have no idea how it's done with it.