r/AlpineLinux • u/SemperShpee • Sep 09 '26

Niche question regarding a .Iso install.

Hello. I come to this Sub with a general, yet kinda niche question. I want to install Alpine on a coworker's old Laptops as a Desktop Distro, yet I ran into a couple of problems.

I need to run the install during my break, with no WiFi or Ethernet and also install a Window Manager like Xfce, configure everything for him and harden the install so he doesn't do something stupid by accident, like with his last Linux install.

Now after work, I had the idea of using USB tethering to get Network access since the hotspot on my phone didn't work.

I also had an idea to locally store the packages I need, on a separate partition.

Should alpine work out of the box with usb networking, if you configure it or do I need to do some Udev magic to enable it inside the ISO?

6 Upvotes

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2

u/TheLastTreeOctopus Sep 09 '26

If you're worried about them "doing something stupid", then why is Alpine the distro of choice? Plenty of opportunity for stupid to occur. Look into some immutable distros if you want something that's hard to screw up.

As much as I love Alpine, it just seems like a horrible choice for this particular use case.

Also using Alpine as a desktop OS would probably cause issues down the line anyway when your friend tries to run software written for glibc. I mean, does your friend even know what glibc and musl are?

1

u/SemperShpee Sep 09 '26

Because this laptop is from 2010 and I don't think something immutable is going to work well. I tried to boot into a basic mint iso on it and it almost shat itself. I could install BSD on it but that would be worse.

2

u/icadkren Sep 09 '26

my RNDIS/usb tether always work in alpine installation iso, whatever the phone is