HowTo: Finit on Alpine Linux 3.4-3.6
Mini HowTo using Finit to boot an Alpine Linux system. It is assumed that the user has already installed a compiler, C library header files, and other tools needed to build a GNU configure based project.
To start with you need to first install libuEv and libite, by
default they install to /usr/local and Alpine's pkg-config does not
look for libraries and header files there. So the PKG_CONFIG_LIBDIR
environment variable must be used:
alpine:~/finit# PKG_CONFIG_LIBDIR=/usr/local/lib/pkgconfig ./configure \
--enable-rw-rootfs --enable-progress \
--enable-dbus-plugin --enable-x11-common-plugin \
--enable-alsa-utils-plugin --enable-inetd-echo-plugin \
--enable-inetd-chargen-plugin --enable-inetd-daytime-plugin \
--enable-inetd-discard-plugin --enable-inetd-time-plugin \
--with-heading="Alpine Linux 3.6" --with-hostname=alpine
The plugins are optional, but you may need D-Bus and X11 if you want to run X-Window, the other configure flags are however required.
alpine:~/finit# make all install
The installation skips /sbin/init, because it already exists, and
Alpine is hard coded to use it. So you have to change the symlink
yourself to point to finit instead of /bin/busybox.
alpine:~/finit# cd /sbin
alpine:/sbin# rm init
alpine:/sbin# ln -s finit init
Before rebooting, make sure to set up a /etc/finit.conf, and /etc/finit.d/ for your services, possibly also an /etc/rc.local for one-shot set up and initialization like keyboard language etc. You can use the files in this directory as templates -- check them both if they need to be tweaked for your installation, you may not run Dropbear SSH or speak Swedish ...