Alpine Linux is a musl and BusyBox based Linux distribution, which aims to be lightweight and secure by default while still being useful for general purpose tasks.
The release of the new version of Alpine Linux 3.19, a version that includes a large number of updates, as well as the integration of support for RPi 5, improvements and more.
For those who are unaware of the distribution, they should know that this 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 3.19
In this new version that is presented of Alpine Linux 3.19 the update of the Linux kernel to version 6.6 LTS stands out together with which is added the support for Raspberry Pi 5 and the Kernels are replaced linux-rpi4 and linux-rpi2 for a single "linux-rpi" Kernel.
In addition to this, we can also find updates to the desktop environments GNOME 45, LXQt 1.4 and for the KDE desktop environment, the KDE Gear 23.08 packages are included along with KDE Frameworks 5.112.
Another change that stands out in the new version of Alpine Linux 3.19 is that python packages directory is now marked as managed by an external tool. This change prevents pip from no longer installing packages in the system directory, whose content is managed by the apk package manager), it is mentioned that pipx should now be used instead of pip.
Of the other changes that stand out of this new version:
- Package versions have been updated, including GCC 13.2, LLVM 17, Perl 5.38, 4.18, Rust 16, yggdrasil 20.10, PipeWire 18.2,
- The default iptables backend is the iptables-nft package.
- The OpenRC package contains a patch that allows most services to be started in netns namespaces.
- Due to a license change to a non-free one, the HashiCorp packages: Consul, Nomad, Packer, Terraform and Vault were removed.
- openrc has removed /sbin/rc the obsolete binary
- EFI_ZBOOT was enabled for aarch64 kernels. This change requires grub to be reinstalled with grub-install –bootloader-id=alpine –efi-directory=/boot (or /boot/efi)
- yggdrasil has been updated to 0.5 and the new routing scheme is incompatible with previous versions.
Finally, if you are interested in knowing more about this new version, you can consult the details In the following link.
Alpine Linux 3.19 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.
ISO images are prepared in six versions: standard (207 MB), with unpatched kernel (204 MB), extended (957 MB), for virtual machines (60 MB) and for the Xen hypervisor (239 MB). The link of download is this.
Last, but not least, you should also know that this distribution has an image to use on Raspberry Pi.
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 3.18 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 should flash, indicating that it did recognize the system.
- And ready with it we can start using Alpine Linux on our Raspberry Pi.