Alpine Linux 3.6.0 Released (alpinelinux.org) 59
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."
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Because monocultures are crap, somebody might like it, and this helps get the word out that it's available for use/testing. But don't worry, you are an AC and nobody cares about you, RIGHT?
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Please take your hate and stupidity somewhere else. You clearly have noting at all to contribute.
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There is nothing funny about being a dysfunctional sadist...
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It's tiny, it's used as the base system for containers mainly. No clue who'd run this directly.
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Containers are run on most production systems, including microservices. If your infrastructure runs docker/mesos/kubernetes, chances are you are either using Debian, Ubuntu, or some really tiny distribution like Alpine or CoreOS.
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I think there are more Android devices than Windows desktops, several times more really. You may need to reevaluate your market share numbers from 2005.
Also we shouldn't post news of the Hubble telescope or James Webb telescope. Astronomy makes up less than 2% of science, and those telescopes make up a tiny fraction of the 2%.
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Google is dumping Linux for its phones, though.
What you may think you know about Fuchsia OS is wrong.
Linux will have both the quickest rise and fall in usage in all operating systems history!
Linux: a flash in the pan!
R.I.P. Linux (1991-2017) - Died so young, only 25 years old
R.I.P. MS-DOS (1981-1994) - Wait only 13 years before its demise?
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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 w
Re: Who cares? (Score:2)
Linux on non-PCs (Score:2)
In the platforms listed above - 64-bit POWER machines, 64-bit IBM z Systems computers - Windows 10 does not exist. Linux based OSs are the only game in town. IBM does a distro (I believe it's a RHEL port), and now, you have Alpine Linux w/ one as well. I wonder whether IBM still bothers about AIX at all?
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Best thing: Not a Poetterix! (Score:2, Interesting)
Their statement is "We have no plans to implement/switch to systemd, and will try preventing it will ever happen." Looks like there _are_ several sane distributions still around.
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Another cool thing about Alpine is it doesn't use GNU.
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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 a
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I'm assuming that the reason for this was that they wanted to get away from as much GPL stuff as possible, in order to be commercially acceptable. In which case, why did they stay w/ Linux at all, particularly since it necessitated their use of GCC, GRUB & binutils. They could have built this on a FreeBSD or NetBSD platform, which would have enabled them to go LLVM/Clang as well as a complete BSDL licensed ecosystem
Re:Best thing: Not a Poetterix! (Score:5, Informative)
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.
About Alpine> [alpinelinux.org]
C standard library comparisons [etalabs.net]
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I don't think even the Gnu people want to take credit for absolutely every bit of code licenced under the GPL.
The LiGnuX and then gnu/linux thing was a special case to raise to profile of Gnu.
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I doubt it. I suspect it's more like uClinux where it was a matter of choosing things to go into a small footprint.
There really are not that many people who make the licence their first choice over function and nearly all of those are too busy arguing about licences to put together a distro.
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It is true, you uninformed little shit.
Why the fuck does the average Slashdotter think that he knows everything? Clearly you are talking out of your ass and have never used or seen Alpine. Being not-GNU is what it's famous (or infamous) for.
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Actually not having these commercial backers may be an advantage here.
Opinions? (Score:5, Interesting)
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....
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Both MD5 and SHA-1 are perfectly good hashing algorithms for non-cyptographic purposes. Removing them make me think that the Alpine folks don't know exactly what they are doing.
Based on how the summary is worded,
And in addition, "MD5 and SHA-1 hashes have been removed from APKBUILDs, being obsoleted by SHA-512.
I'm guessing they replaced MD5 and SHA1 hashes for validating their repositories. Since both MD5 [wikipedia.org] has collision vulnerabilities and SHA1 is starting [wikipedia.org] to have [wikipedia.org] attacks as well, it is probably wise to obsolete these hashes in favor of a new hash. Even Git developers [lwn.net] are starting to make plans to move away from SHA1.
Any way to build Alpine userspace? (Score:3)
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?
pretty unstable in my experience (Score:1)
Too many problems to cite them all. But the main one was hard system lockup. The log files didn't give a clue. The system would just freeze. Run fine for 5 or 6 days, and then just freeze solid. Couldn't ssh into it. Couldn't use the console. Just a hard freeze. Do not use this for anything approaching mission critical because it will let you down at the worst possible time. Maybe I'll give this version a shot to see if they've fixed the problem.
Great Raspberry Pi Distro (Score:1)
In addition to the attention it gets as a base image for containers they actually ship a fairly well supported version for Raspberry Pi: https://wiki.alpinelinux.org/wiki/Raspberry_Pi
I've had far fewer issues with it than I have with Raspbian and it's default ramdisk configuration means that you are very unlikely to end up with a corrupted SD card in long lived embedded situations.