libinput on Alpine Linux

Get the sources:

git clone git://anongit.freedesktop.org/git/wayland/libinput

Dependencies

libinput requires the following packages to be installed:

• libudev
• mtdev
• libevdev

and the following libraries are optional:

• libwacom
• doxygen (for documentation)

Look in meson_options.txt for more detail on these.

apk add eudev eudev-dev mtdev mtdev-dev libevdev libevdev-dev

Run the configure script

libinput requires the meson build system which is built on Python and uses ninja to compile the sources. If python 3.5 (or above) and meson are not already installed you should do that now.

apk add meson

Configure then compile the sources:

meson . build -Dlibwacom=false -Ddocumentation=false -Ddebug-gui=false
cd build
ninja

This should be successful, I am using version libinput 1.10.900 and it is working well on Alpine Linux.

See some debug output

There are some rules files for udev / eudev in the build directory that should be installed on your system. They begin with 80- and 90-. These files can be copied manually to /lib/udev/rules.d and /lib/udev/hwdb.d or you can install with ninja.

I recommend manually as we did not configure the prefix for meson and by default the prefix is /usr/local.

When the rules are installed udev can add the devices to the libinput database (or whatever libinput uses to enumerate devices) and use them :-). Naturally just copying the files did not actually do anything... next fire up udev and trigger the events from the kernel:

/etc/init.d/udev start
udevadm trigger

Now you can see the keypresses and mouse movements:

./libinput-debug-events

Excellent!