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Alpine Linux on the Raspberry Pi 4

The Raspberry Pi 4 is a pretty adorable piece of technology.

In a credit card-sized footprint, it's got a fully fledged four-core ARM computer, with 4 GB of RAM (other variations have more or less RAM), a gigabit RJ45 Ethernet port, WiFi and Bluetooth connectivity, HDMI display output, two USB 2.0 ports and two USB 3.0 ports.

For me its main draw was how inexpensive it is while, in principle, still being a fully-featured desktop Linux computer.

I have to admit it, it's not the fastest. Most modern websites can take enough to load to the point of being annoying. I switch to a phone or an actual computer for any important stuff, so it can't be considered a full desktop replacement.

Still, I had plenty of fun tinkering, re-installing Linux, troubleshooting and getting it configured just how I like it.

More recently, after I hosed the previous Raspberry Pi OS installation, the officially supported Debian-based image by the manufacturer, I decided to give Alpine Linux a go.

Alpine is a distribution of Linux which focuses on being lightweight. It achieves that by replacing the two main central which other distributions use, Systemd and GNU libc, with simpler and less featured alternatives, Open RC and musl libc, respectively. It also happens to provide an image for the Raspberry Pi 4, which I flashed into an SD Card.

Funnily enough, the first ever publication on this website was about installing Alpine with a GUI. Since then, I got some more practice with using Alpine on containers and Virtual Machines, so installing it on the Pi was very similar and uneventful.

My final setup involves:

I found the overall system to be usable and stable. After all, there aren't many moving pieces and thus not much that can go wrong. Almost every software that runs on there is because I've installed it, so I know what everything does.

I'm using it mainly for experimentation on Linux, terminal-based computing, text editing on vim, remoting into my main computer (through SSH/tmux), and as a low power computer that I can leave always on (it draws at most 15W, but typically less, so on par with a LED lamp).

Unfortunately, since the time I bought it two or three years ago, Brazil has decided to enforce tariffs on online marketplaces such as AliExpress which ship from China, so the “inexpensive” angle is gone. So I guess that's all she wrote.