This week has been mostly trying to get Alpine linux to act like Archiso with varying levels of success.
Alpine by default loads everything into ram. Packages are in a compressed file along with any root files. This is fine for a tty/console based iso image that is not on the heavy side. Once you start adding bigger applications and desktops, ram runs out very quickly.
So needed to find an alternative. Have managed to get squashfs to contain packages and settings and am trying to get it load via overlayfs. However Alpine is having none of it! It does load the required module and it does start to create the overlay but it continues to load /lib/modules instead of squashed image. This would give me an upper read only mount and a lower writable [aka in ram] for system file changes etc.
Alpine linux init system is quite complex and I am trying to make it do something it was never designed to do. Most of the information I have found on overlayfs more relates to the raspberry pi.
So I know I can build an iso image that runs and acts like ArchBang but it is ram heavy. Or I can carry on working on init scripts to see if I can get this to work on say a target of 2Gbs of ram. Currently 1Gbs fails to even load desktop as it runs out of room.
Should I switch to a lighter browser? Well it is an option but the likes of Dillo and Netsurf are quite limited online. Why not just install GreenBang to a usb device/drive and r run from there? Certainly solves a lot of issues, add whatever I/user needs and ram is free to run, persistence between boots etc.
Side note I do know that sound is not working out of the box, really wanted to get the engine working first before adding features so bear with me.
If all else fails I will switch base to Void which I know will work out of the box, but feels to me like giving up.
ArchBang is of course updated as normal with latest packages included.
Enjoy the rest of your weekend.
Stay Safe 😉