On 8/9/22 16:35, Ladislav Slezák wrote:

Hi all,

I did some testing of the new ALP project and here are some notes about installing and configuring it.

If you have more tips for the ALP then just write them here, thank you in advance!

1. Download ===========

You can download the ALP images directly from

    https://download.opensuse.org/repositories/SUSE:/ALP/images/

there are pre-built images for several platforms, choose the one which best fits your use case.

In the iso/ subdirectory you can find bootable ISO images which can be used to install ALP in any system (even bare metal).

Note: As ALP is still in heavy development it is recommended to use a virtual machine for testing.

There are two types of images - with transactional system (read-only file system with snapshots) or non-transactional (classic, writable file system). Here it depends what you need to do and if you are already familiar with a transactional system.

If unsure then I'd suggest starting with the non-transactional images as they are more close to the traditional systems and are easier to use and manage.

2. Installation ===============

Uncompress the downloaded image with "unxz" and use the disk image in your favorite VM platform.

If you use the ISO image then just boot from it and then confirm deploying the image on the disk. Be careful, this rewrites ALL data on the target disk!

3. Configuration ================

The disk images use empty password for the root user (just press ENTER when asked for the password).

The ISO image installs a simple configuration tool [1] which runs at the first boot and can configure some basic things like locales or the root password.

4. Storage ==========

The disk images use virtual disk with size from 20 to 30GB (depends on the type) so there is quite a lot of free space for experimenting.

The ISO image installer creates just a 2GB root partition where about 1.2GB is used. So there is not much space for experimenting, especially if you want to run some containers.

You can expand the root partition over the whole disk with these commands:

    # resize the partition, the root FS is on /dev/sda4     # (note the space between the disk and the partition number!!)     growpart /dev/sda 4     # resize the filesystem     /usr/lib/systemd/systemd-growfs /

Btrfs can be resized online (while mounted) so you can see the result immediately and you do not need to reboot. You might check the resulting size with "df -h /".

5. SSH Access =============

By default the SSH service is enabled and running. However, the root login is not allowed by default.

There are two options:

1. Create a regular user:

    # create the user     useradd <username>     # set the password     passwd <username>

   Then use this user in the SSH connection. If you need to switch to root    then use "su" or "sudo" later.

2. Allow root Login

    # create a config file     echo "PermitRootLogin yes" > /etc/ssh/sshd_config.d/root.conf     # restart the service     systemctl restart sshd

   Then connect as root via SSH.

6. Software ===========

If you need to install some more packages then you can use zypper with the pre-configured ALP repository.

If you need some package which is not present there then you might try adding an OBS repository which is built against openSUSE Tumbleweed. (ALP is based on TW so the packages should be compatible in the most cases.)

So if you want to try the latest YaST packages (especially the "yast-in-container" package) then use this repository [2].

   HTH!

   Ladislav

[1] https://github.com/openSUSE/jeos-firstboot [2] https://download.opensuse.org/repositories/YaST:/Head/openSUSE_Tumbleweed/

Great summary! Thanks Ladislav. IMHO, this guide deserves a wiki (or similar) page. -- José Iván López González YaST Team at SUSE LINUX GmbH IRC: jilopez