Alpine Linux 3.6.0 Released (alpinelinux.org)

An anonymous reader quotes DistroWatch: Natanael Copa has announced the release of Alpine Linux 3.6.0. Alpine Linux is an independent, minimal operating system that is well suited to running servers, routers and firewalls. Version 3.6.0 introduces support for 64-bit POWER machines, 64-bit IBM z Systems computers and features many up to date packages, including PHP 7.1, LLVM 4.0 and version 6.3 of the GNU Compiler.
"Noteworthy new packages" include Rust 1.17.0 and Cargo 0.18.0, as well as Julia 0.5.2, as we ll as "significant updates" like Go 1.8, Python 3.6, and Ruby 2.4. And in addition, "MD5 and SHA-1 hashes have been removed from APKBUILDs, being obsoleted by SHA-512."

Comments

Re:Who cares?

[Anonymous Coward]

Alpine Linux has been adopted by Docker as their preferred GNU/Linux distribution for containers. I have been using this distribution for the past 2 years which has enabled me to build and deploy small-footprint images running applications in isolation, as well as creating an environment for students to learn how the command line applications can be put to use in data analytics.

I began using GNU/Linux, in the form of SLS, during the autumn of 1992 and switched full-time during the winter of 2000 initially with Debian GNU/Linux, followed by Ubuntu Linux during the summer of 2011, eventually moving to Xubuntu Linux during the autumn of 2015.

Re:Best thing: Not a Poetterix!

[syzler]

MUSL and busybox (FYI, busybox is GPL) fit better with the first of the Alpine Linux's stated design goals which are "Small, simple, and secure." MUSL's dynamic libc is only 527K where as glibc is 7.9M. Static hello program is 13K with MUSL and 662K with glibc. Busybox is less than 1M, however coreutils is >13M, vim is >28M, GNU sed/awk is > 2M, etc. MUSL and Busybox make a smaller system than GNU libc, GNU coreutils, and other GNU userspace programs replaced by busybox.

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