Linux Administration Cookbook

How it works...

Breaking down what we're doing here step by step, we started out by downloading an ISO image from the Alpine website. This is the easiest thing to explain, as we're effectively using the ISO as a source of truth for our installation. You can also do things such as pass /dev/cdrom through to your VM, should you wish to use the physical drive in your machine (and you live in 2009).

Once we had our ISO image, we then created a file-based block device to install atop. This is so that we can segment one installation from another, and even move the installation from machine to machine should we wish. There are other solutions that don't involve using files – you could partition an LVM setup, giving some of the space to your VM, ...