# Alpine on Framework

For some years now my main personal laptop has been a 2013-era Macbook Pro.
I've been mostly pretty happy with it and it honestly still works really well
except that the battery is starting to die the final death and it's becoming
hard to use when not actually plugged in. Major bummer, and I was sort of
casually looking around for a new laptop but there wasn't anything super good
looking out there so I decided to just wait... until a friend of a friend
turned out to have a near-new Framework laptop they were looking to get rid of.
Score :)

My favorite Linux distro has been Alpine for a long time, but I've never really
used it as my primary daily-use OS before, so I figured I might as well try it.
It turned out to be mostly easier than I expected!

## Booting the Installer

Getting an Alpine installer onto a stick is literally as easy as:

$ wget alpine.iso alpine.iso.sha256
$ sha256sum -c alpine.iso.sha256
$ dd if=alpine.iso of=/dev/sdX
$ cmp /dev/sdX alpine.iso

The system came with a debian install on it that I didn't want. It took me a
while to even figure out how to get into the boot menu; apparently the thing
Linux does when you tell it to reboot causes some sort of fast reboot in the
Framework's firmware (?) that makes the boot prompt not show up. Eventually I
had to power off the machine, cold-boot it, and tap F12 to get into the boot
menu... which offered my USB stick as an option but firmly refused to actually
boot it. Hmm.

I ended up needing to turn off UEFI secure boot, which was enabled - I don't
know if the Framework came this way or not. Once I turned that off, the Alpine
installer booted, although the Framework's firmware is a bit finicky: you
apparently can't press F12 while the POST is running or it will hang. Ow.

## Installing Alpine

I originally tried to follow a complicated, manual procedure to set up a LUKS
encrypted root on LVM, which was both painful and ultimately totally not
necessary. Don't do that; it's not worth the bother. I also briefly flirted
with trying to set up LUKS by hand and run parts of the Alpine installation
flow but that also did not yield a bootable system.

What actually *does* work, and what I should have tried first, is to just run
the setup-alpine script in the totally normal way and tell it to use an
encrypted root. For whatever reason I didn't think Alpine would support this
but it totally does and you should just do that. So, yeah:

$ setup-alpine

That took not very long, and then I was able to power the machine off, unplug
the USB stick, and boot into my new system. Yay!

## Networking & X11

Getting networking going was easy, except that the package set I had did not
seem to include wpa_supplicant, so I had to find an ethernet adapter to
bootstrap things enough to get onto wifi. Simple enough. I have my system set
up so that it doesn't start networking at boot[1], so when I want to be
connected I do:

$ /etc/init.d/networking start

But no other fiddling was required here, except for writing a wpa_supplicant
config file.

X11 turned out to be a different beast. I was used to systems like Debian,
where installing xserver-xorg also installs dozens of auxiliary packages with
input drivers, graphics drivers, and so on. On Alpine, if you install the X
server, you're just installing the X server, so when I installed X and did:

$ startx

It didn't start, complaining about not having any graphics drivers. That was easy
enough to fix, but then I had an X with graphics output but no input... sigh,
back to the package mines. I ended up installing:

* xf86-video-intel
* xf86-input-evdev

However, xf86-input-evdev did *not* work with the Framework's touchpad at all;
the cursor moved, but clicks didn't register. When I checked xinput, the
touchpad was being detected as a "generic mouse". I suspected I could fix the
lack of clicks, but I doubted I would get a pleasing result for multi-touch or
swipe gestures, so I fell back on something I knew better: xf86-input-synaptics.

I had to do a little bit of configuration to convince X to let the synaptics
driver handle the touchpad:

Section "InputClass"
	Identifier "mouse0"
	MatchIsTouchpad "true"
	Driver "synaptics"
EndSection

Normally you don't need to do this since modern X can figure stuff out. That
got my a working touchpad... ish.

## Multi-touch

None of the gestures I could figure out to paste actually worked, which was
pretty irritating since my password manager likes to drop passwords into the
clipboard. Fortunately the synaptics input driver has a ton of knobs, and I
could do:

	Option "ClickFinger2" "2"
	Option "TapButton2" "3"

ClickFinger2 is 2-finger click, so that line makes synaptics map that gesture
to "middle mouse button", and TapButton2 is two-finger tap, which I had
synaptics map to "right mouse button". Yay!

## Fonts

Since the Framework has a very high-res display (2256 x 1504), everything was
extremely tiny and kind of annoying to read. I am not actually sure what the
correct way to fix this is, but what I actually did was just turn the font
size up. In my .Xresources:

	UXTerm*faceSize: 16

## Chromium

I was pretty surprised when Chromium just worked immediately after install,
including audio and such. The only thing that didn't work was my security key,
which required a little bit of setup; by default udev doesn't know that
security keys should be accessible to my user, so I wrote some udev rules to
assign it:

SUBSYSTEM=="usb" ENV{ID_VENDOR_ID}=="18d1" ENV{ID_MODEL_ID}=="5026" \
	SYMLINK+="sk" GROUP="seat"
KERNEL=="hidraw*", ATTRS{idVendor}=="18d1", ATTRS{idProduct}=="5026" \
	GROUP="seat" MODE="0660"

And that basically did the trick :)

## Tarsnap

The last interesting piece of setup was tarsnap, which is actually packaged
by Alpine, so all I had to do was:

$ tarsnap-keygen --keyfile /root/tarsnap.key --user me --machine esper
$ cp /etc/tarsnap/tarsnap.conf.sample /etc/tarsnap/tarsnap.conf
$ vi /etc/tarsnap/tarsnap.conf
$ tarsnap -c -f ... /etc /home/elly

## Overall Impressions

So far so good! I quite like the feel of the hardware and the modular design,
and Alpine has been much easier to get working than I thought it would be. In
particular I was really bracing myself to have to get to grips with either
sound or video acceleration, but actually they both seem to Just Work. Hooray
Linux on the Desktop 2022!

[1]: A habit I acquired a long time ago but still stick with - my machines
     start offline and are generally offline when I don't need them to be
     online. It helps me manage my own distractability.