Date: Thu, 23 Jan 2020 10:31:35 +0100
From: Natanael Copa <ncopa@alpinelinux.org>
To: PICCORO McKAY Lenz <mckaygerhard@gmail.com>
Cc: alpine-user <alpine-user@lists.alpinelinux.org>
Subject: Re: mkfs.vfat are but not ext3? why only extended images are
 offline installable?
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On Wed, 22 Jan 2020 16:21:42 -0400
PICCORO McKAY Lenz <mckaygerhard@gmail.com> wrote:

> as of handbook said only extended are offline install able,
> BUT THAT ARE ONLY IN x86 ARCHS, no arm/virtual offline media could be found
> and that causes lot of troubles!

That is the price we are paying for small release media. The idea is
that you will likely need network to get the latest security updates
anyway, and it is nice to get those while doing the install rather than
first install to disk and then update. It is also not know exactly what
applications the user wants so an offline iso would need a wide range
of different possible combinations a user may want. This again means
that the offline iso will be big and most users will not use majority
of the contents there. So the big iso download result in a waste of
bandwidth, both for users and for all the alpine mirrors. Better have
the release media small and let users only download what they need when
they need it.

You can use the extended in a virtual environment. For other
architectures you need network.

> i tested all and this are the problems .. due in my home there's no
> networking;
> also for virtual ones there's some troubles if need network in prior stage
> of..
> what about if i have a xtrange network card in newer hardware?
> 
> 1) put media dn boot
> 2) logi as root, of course no password
> * setup-keymap es es
> * setup-timezone -z UTC
> * fdisk /dev/sda
> * input secuence: `o, n, p, 2048, +100G, n, p, enter, +4G, t, 2, 82, w`
> * mkfs.ext3 -b 2048 /dev/sda1
> 
> here said that only have available the stupid mkfs.vfat .. incredible.. but
> not mkfs.ext3?

mkfs.vfat is an applet in busybox. e2fsprogs was excluded because not
everyone uses ext3/4, and you will need network to fetch the kernel
anyways.

-nc