Alpine Linux Template (non-official) available for testing

General Discussion
33

Upgrading to v3.21

With the first release candidate out for Alpine 3.21, I’ve built the packages against it. You can already upgrade to this release, although you must follow these steps first. Not doing so will break your template! There is an issue with upgrading qubes-libvchan-xen which requires manual intervention.

Option A

  1. Change release of repos in /etc/apk/repositories to 3.21
  2. apk update
  3. apk fetch qubes-libvchan-xen
  4. apk add --allow-untrusted qubes-libvchan-xen-*.apk
  5. apk upgrade -a

Option B

(less recommended)

  1. Temporarily attach your template to a network qubes (i.e sys-firewall)
  2. Change release of repos in /etc/apk/repositories to 3.21
  3. apk upgrade -a
  4. Detach template from the network qubes

What is happening?

Alpine’s packager apk installs packages while downloading. This makes apk faster than other package keepers. To avoid having templates connected to the internet, apk is setup to go over a proxy.

The problem is that when upgrading qubes-libvchan-xen, which is a dependency of this proxy, apk upgrades xen first without downloading the package. Thus, when upgrading qubes-libvchan-xen, download / installation fails, which then breaks the proxy. Thus, qubes-libvchan-xen can never be downloaded, and thus your template is in a broken non-bootable state.

The above interventions either forces installation of qubes-libvchan-xen before upgrading xen, or removes the need for the proxy by having the template attached to a network qubes.

Template RPM

In any case, an RPM for v3.21 will be released once 3.21 is officially released. It’ll be available here: Packages - forge/qubes-builder-alpine - Ayakael: My personal forge

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