Existing Alpine installation

WARNING: This process is not supported and might leave your device in a weird state. Here be dragons.

To turn Alpine into postmarketOS:

Install Alpine Linux
Enable the community repository
Add one of these mirrors to the top of /etc/apk/repositories, Change master to the correct release for your alpine version (eg: postmarketos v22.06 on alpine 3.16, see releases):

https://mirror.postmarketos.org/postmarketos/master

Add this key as a file called "build.postmarketos.org.rsa.pub" into /etc/apk/keys

or

Add postmarketOS public key with apk:

# apk add -u --allow-untrusted postmarketos-keys

Use your device package kernel for your device: (skip this if installing onto a desktop\laptop computer)

# apk add -u postmarketos-base device-nokia-n900

Install the packages for the UI you want, for example:

# apk add -u postmarketos-ui-xfce4

or

# apk add -u postmarketos-ui-weston

(Use device-qemu-amd64 for a x86_64 virtual machine installation, but this will also install a kernel -- maybe it makes sense to introduce a new "docker device" without any kernel, you could experiment with that if you want.)

If you want to use the postmarketOS initramfs, make sure that you adjust the partition labels accordingly.

Note that alpine users start at 1000 and postmarketos users start at 10000. Some files provided by postmarketos-base may not match the existing system. eg: /etc/conf.d/tinydm

See also