Few days ago the release of the new version of the Linux distribution, “Alpine Linux 3.16” was announced, a minimalist distro built on the basis of the Musl system library and the BusyBox suite of utilities.
The distribution is distinguished by higher security requirements and is built with SSP protection (Stack Smashing Protection). OpenRC is used as the initialization system and its own apk package manager is used for package management. Alpine is used to build official Docker container images.
Main new features of Alpine Linux 3.16
In this new version that is presented of Alpine Linux 3.16 improved compatibility with NVMe drives in the system configuration scripts, added the ability to create an administrator account and added support for adding keys for SSH.
Another change that stands out in this new version is that the package with the sudo utility has been moved to the community repository, which means that the generation of updates with vulnerability removal is only for the latest stable branch of sudo. Instead of sudo it is recommended to use doas (a simplified analogue of sudo from the OpenBSD project) or the doas-sudo-shim layer, which provides a replacement for the sudo command, which runs on top of the doas utility.
In addition to this, the icu-data package with data for internationalization is divided into two packages: icu-data-en (2.6 MiB, only the locale en_US/GB is included) and icu-data-full (29 MiB ).
Of the other changes that stand out in this new version:
- A new setup-desktop script has been proposed to simplify the setup of the desktop environment.
- The /tmp partition is now mapped in memory using the tmpfs file system.
- Plugins for NetworkManager have been moved to separate packages: networkmanager-wifi, networkmanager-adsl, networkmanager-wwan, networkmanager-bluetooth, networkmanager-ppp, and networkmanager-ovs.
- The SDL 1.2 library has been superseded by the sdl12-compat package, which provides an API that is compatible with SDL 1.2 binary and source code, but runs on top of SDL 2.
- Busybox, dropbear, mingetty, openssh, util-linux packages are built with utmps support.
The util-linux-login package is used to provide the login command. - Updated package versions including KDE Plasma 5.24, KDE Gears 22.04, Plasma Mobile 22.04, GNOME 42, Go 1.18, LLVM 13, Node.js 18.2, Ruby 3.1, Rust 1.60, Python 3.10, PHP 8.1, R 4.2, Xen 4.16, Podman 4.0. Removed packages from php7 and python2.
Finally, if you are interested in knowing more about this new version, you can consult the details In the following link.
Alpine Linux 3.16 download
If you want to download this new Alpine Linux update, you must go to the official website of the project where you can obtain the image of the system according to the architecture of the equipment where you will use it.
You should also know that this distribution has an image to use on Raspberry Pi.
Bootable iso images (x86_64, x86, armhf, aarch64, armv7, ppc64le, s390x) are prepared in five versions: standard (155 MB), unpatched kernel (168 MB), advanced (750 MB) and for virtual machines ( 49MB).
The link of download is this.
How to install Alpine Linux on Raspberry Pi?
If you plan to use this system on your small pocket computer, you can do so by following these instructions below.
- Done the download, we must format our SD card, we can support Gparted, the SD card must be in fat32 format.
- Done this we must now save the image of Alpine Linux 3.11 in our SD, For this we only have to unzip the file that contains the Alpine files.
- Once the download is done, we only have to copy the content inside our SD card.
- At the end only we must insert the SD card in our Raspberry Pi and connect it to power and the system should start running.
- We will realize this because the green LED must blink indicating that it did recognize the system.
- And ready with it we can start using Alpine Linux on our Raspberry Pi.