AlpineLinux install etc

Visiting fringes (chapter 1) or,
to put it diplomatically - trying out distros outside of top twenty.
The point - looking for a new pet when Debian goes systemd, or - God forbid - the same happens to my home - beloved Slackware. Also, seeking some cheap thrill.

Somewhere I noticed that AlpineLinux is a distro with busybox and open-rc. It also has its' own package manager - apk, which has dependency-check. And the distro was mentioned as lean alternative desktop (despite it being officially oriented "for x86 Routers, Firewalls, VPNs, VoIP and servers"). Desktops are: XFCE, Gnome, Openbox, Fluxbox - at least. Slim and lxdm are display managers.
What follows here is: a) A short description of various installs up to desktop; b) At the end there is also short list of apps that are not available in this distro - for pre-consideration, because install certainly takes some time.

# Install (to sda7, without grub)
I dd-d ISO to usb-stick and booted without any problems.
It lands to console, where you login as root (enter). Then:
mount -t ext4 /dev/sda7 /mnt
setup-timezone
setup-alpine -q
setup-sshd
setup-ntp
setup-disk -m sys /mnt
And it should be installed (it was mind-bogglingly fast procedure).
umount && reboot

Then I went and fixed my master-grub in wheezy, added into
/boot/grub/grub.cfg:
menuentry "Alpine Linux, sda7" {
 set root=(hd0,7)
 linux /boot/vmlinuz-grsec root=UUID=ba5767878-4a8c-40ed-b710-c4e2b42d6b7a modules=sd-mod,usb-storage,ext4 quiet
 initrd /boot/initramfs-grsec
}
Rebooted to Alpine.

# Post-install. There is a lot to do - nothing got installed but pure system.
Comment first line  - /media/usb/apks - in your /etc/apk/repositories
or apk will whine warnings all the time.
setup-apkcache  # enable local cache, store packs locally. I am not sure it's needed witk hdd-install, but I did it anyway.
apk update  # update package-list.
apk upgrade  # upgrade what's installed.

And here we go with adding shit and all:
apk add nano  # trying to avoid vim :)
apk add bash bash-doc  # default shell is ash. In /etc/passwd , changed shell to /bin/bash
adduser myusername
nano /etc/group and I added my fresh user to groups: lp, audio, video, cdrom, plugdev, netdev, power, wheel (and whatever).
nano /etc/sudoers and uncommented 'allow wheel members whatever sudo thingy' at near files' end.

Back to adding things:
apk add perl automake cmake build-base qt sudo
setup-xorg-base  # this one is script
apk add xorg-server
Evdev, mouse and keyboard came automatically. But not video:
apk search xf86-video   # to find what drivers there are. For me it was
apk add xf86-video-nouveau
NB! It seems that it's impossible to install Nvidia binary, so, nouveau it has to be.
I did not 'Xorg -configure' - it started without that.

apk add udev  # Manual says that you should do the following below. I forgot, and then I discovered that it was already automagically done ... but whatever:
/etc/init.d/udev start && /etc/init.d/udev-postmount start
rc-update add udev sysinit
rc-update add udev-postmount default

apk add xfce4-terminal xarchiver
First one brought a pile of good things (cairo, pango, hicolor...)
apk add openbox
touch ~/.xinitrc && echo "exec openbox-session" >> ~/.xinitrc

# startx
Now, I suppose that whomever installs Alpine, already has a bunch of confs hoarded - and now it's time to copy-and-fix them for Alpine. From .config/openbox/* to .bashrc and gtk.
After that I installed fonts (search 'font' in alpinelinux.org 'Packages' for suitable ones), gtk+2.0, gtkmm, gtkmm-dev (and with gtk's there will be enormous pile of nice addons), gtk-engines, coreutils, py-gtk, firefox, pcmanfm, geany, feh, conky, alsa.
Alsa wants also something like that:
alsactl init
rc-update add alsa
rc-service alsa start

# What is not there, of my favourite basics:
obconf, lxappearance, spacefm, medit, nitrogen, tint2, compton, smplayer, volumeicon, wmctrl, xdotool...
Wmctrl I made from from source, it needs libxmu-dev.
It's not possible to make spacefm and udevil (in reasonable way) - and that is quite a showstopper for me.
Volumeicon - it compiled, through some wrestling, but didn't work anyway.
That is the point I reached currently.
To mention more not-there-apps-and-shit: LXDE, Mate, lxpanel, leafpad, gedit, libreoffice, meld, gcolor2, qeeqie, chromium ... etc.

# Conclusion
Desktop on AlpineLinux is definitely possible. IF available stuff is of your taste. I am missing some 80% of what I prefere... Compiling in Alpine is ...errr ... hit and miss.
So, despite that I kinda like Alpine - and it's fast alright - it looks, I am on the road again.
Also see - the second round of Alpines' install - Lenovo laptop.