CopalAlpine Linux

One installer turns stock Alpine into a finished desktop — on a Raspberry Pi, a PC, or a virtual machine on your Mac — in eighteen stages you can re-run in any order.

Copal is tree resin caught halfway to amber: hardened, but not yet stone. Alpine boots diskless — its root filesystem is a RAM disk that evaporates at power-off — and Copal is what sets it on the disk without giving up the smallness that made it worth booting.

./copal build vm ./copal card pi4

One command on your Mac. It asks what you are building, shows the consequences, and writes an SD card, a UEFI disk image or a virtual machine.

01What you get

The Copal desktop on Hyprland: an Art Nouveau wallpaper of lilies, a large clock, the bar along the top, and the Mint-style application menu open on the left. — **The full monty.** Hyprland with the Linux Antiquity theme, the bar along the top, and the application menu laid out the way Linux Mint's is — on an aarch64 virtual machine on a Mac.

Copal is an opinionated desktop, decided once so you do not have to: a tiling Wayland compositor, a theme drawn from old scientific illustration, a menu for the mouse and a launcher for the keyboard, a toolchain with an AI agent in it, and a shelf of programs chosen because they are good — each with two sentences saying what it is. The desktop →

Server

No screen attached.

The base system made persistent, compressed RAM swap, your SSH key, the partition grown into the disk, then root handed over to doas. Nothing graphical at all.

Any board

Medium

X11 and i3, on the framebuffer.

The tiling desktop that fits a Pi Zero: X rendering on the CPU, i3, a terminal, the catalogue, emulators and the toolchain. The ceiling for the smallest boards.

Every board, 512 MB and up

Full monty

Hyprland, themed as Linux Antiquity.

Everything above, then a GPU-composited Wayland desktop, Copal Apps, and sixteen more programs installed at the first login while a slideshow shows each one arriving.

aarch64 and x86_64

02Where it runs

Nine targets, one script. The Raspberry Pi boards are written as SD cards that the Pi's own firmware boots; everything else is a UEFI disk, and on a Mac with Apple Silicon a UTM virtual machine runs the ARM build at native speed. Every platform, and what has been tested on it →

Target	Architecture	What it is
zero	armhf	Pi Zero, Zero W, Pi 1 — the board this was written for
pi2b	armv7	Pi 2 B v1.1
zero2	aarch64	Pi Zero 2 W, Pi 3, CM3
pi4, pi5	aarch64	Pi 4, Pi 400, CM4, Pi 5 — the boards with power to spare
pc	x86_64	any UEFI PC or laptop, or an Intel Mac
pc32	x86	32-bit UEFI machines
vm	aarch64	UTM on Apple Silicon — native speed
vmx86	x86_64	UTM emulating a PC on Apple Silicon

03How it installs

You answer a handful of questions on your Mac, boot the result, pick a level, and walk away. Every program Copal puts on the machine is a playbook — one file per project, with its prerequisites, its steps and its two sentences — and every install is recorded, so what happened can be read afterwards rather than guessed at. The installer →

04Built on Alpine

Alpine Linux is small, simple and secure: musl libc, BusyBox, OpenRC and the apk package manager — by Alpine's own count, a minimal install to disk needs about 130 MB. Copal downloads stock Alpine, checks it against Alpine's own published checksum, and builds on it with Alpine's own tools. It is not a fork, and nothing in it is a binary you have to trust. Why Alpine →

05Software made for it

Copal Apps, the menus, the clipboard bridge, a fleet console for a room of machines, a Geiger counter's instrument panel, a task manager in one terminal window — and a gallery of 203 programs photographed running on it. The software →

Honest about what this is. Copal is an aggregation of Alpine Linux: it downloads stock Alpine and calls Alpine's own tools. It is not a fork, not a remaster, and not affiliated with or endorsed by the Alpine project. It is one person's desktop, built in the open and documented as it goes.