Terminal cheat sheet
Here's a small reference for working with postmarketOS/Alpine Linux.
Package management
The package manager in postmarketOS is called apk
, the Alpine Package Keeper. The list of packages can be found on https://pkgs.alpinelinux.org/packages and https://pkgs.postmarketos.org/packages as both repositories are added to postmarketOS installations.
Installing a package
$ apk add vim
Uninstalling a package
$ apk del vim
Upgrading the system. The -a
option allows downgrading packages to what's available in the repository. This is sometimes needed when packages are moved from a git version to a stable release.
$ apk upgrade -a
Listing installed package versions (add | grep package-name
to filter for a specific package):
$ apk info -vv
The repositories are stored in /etc/apk/repositories
as one repository url per line. There's also /etc/apk/world
which is a list of packages that are explicitly installed. It's possible to add/remove packages from this list and then running apk fix
to apply those changes. The Alpine Linux wiki has a page comparing apk to other popular distros, with many helpful examples.
Service management
The service manager in postmarketOS is OpenRC. The basic service management is done with the familiar service
command.
$ service networkmanager status
$ service networkmanager start
$ service networkmanager stop
$ service networkmanager restart
To enable or disable services on boot you use the rc-update
command.
List the services that are added to a runlevel
$ rc-update
bootmisc | boot
chronyd | default
dbus | default
devfs | sysinit
dmesg | sysinit
gdm | default
haveged | default
hostname | boot
hwclock | boot
killprocs | shutdown
Start NetworkManager on boot (in the default runlevel)
$ rc-update add networkmanager default
Stop NetworkManager starting on boot
$ rc-update del networkmanager default
Log files
By default postmarketOS uses the busybox logging daemon for the syslog and it's configured to log to memory only. The logread
command is used to read the in-memory log. Writing standard output and standard error of a system service to the filesystem can be achieved by adding output_log
and error_log
to its service script, as described in the manual page of openrc-run
.
Man pages
Man pages are not installed by default and are seperate from the normal packages. The docs
package is a metapackage that will pull in all the documentation for the software you have installed. You can also install only the documentation you need by not installing the docs
package
but installing the specific documentation subpackage. For example for vim documentation you can install vim-doc
the mandoc package is the man page reader itself
the man-apropos adds the apropos manpage search tool
the man-pages package will add the pages for core software like chmod but also linux headers
the docs package is a metapackage that pulls in the -doc package for everything you install
$ apk add mandoc man-apropos man-pages docs
$ man vim
Changing your shell
Since the pmos installations are based on busybox the default shell is ash
, which is comparible to sh
. There are multiple shells packaged in Alpine if you want something better:
pick your favorite shell
$ apk add bash zsh fish dash yash oksh elvish
set your login shell
$ chsh -s /bin/zsh
some config distributions are packaged
$ apk add grml-zsh-config oh-my-zsh