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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."
"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."
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.
I know and have used alpine ... mainly in docker containers, I'm not super thrilled with it. Overall, it's main selling point is that, initially... it's small....
Alpine looks pretty cool. A sane init system, musl instead of libc, a decent package manager, what more could you want?
A couple of years ago, I inherited a proprietary ARM board with a large number of GBE NICs, an unmaintained vendor kernel, and the worst userspace you can imagine (and I know you can imagine a lot). I spent half a day trying to build an Alpine userspace for armhf and get it installed on the board.
I finally gave up. It took me 20 minutes to set up debootstrap under qemu, another 20 minutes to coerce debootstrap into using sysvinit instead of systemd. Tar.gz, scp, replace the root filesystem, and the board is running Debian Jessie userspace.
I haven't looked at Alpine since then. Is there now a convenient way to build a custom Alpine root filesystem?
Another cool thing about Alpine is it doesn't use GNU.
And if that were even remotely true, it would be interesting.
Alpine Linux uses MUSL libc and busybox unlike the majority of Linux distros which use GNU for the vast majority of it's user space (i.e. GNU libc, GNU coreutils, GNU sed, GNU awk, etc). Alpine Linux does appear to use GRUB and has GNU gcc and GNU binutils. However for a Linux system, completely abandoning GNU gcc/binutils is not practical since the Linux kernel cannot yet be built with LLVM/CLANG.
So I guess it would have been more appropriate to say that Alpine Linux is not *GNU/Linux* since it is not anymore GNU/Linux than it is *OpenSSL/Linux* or *Dropbear/Linux*.
More appropriately it is *MUSL/Linux*.
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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