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Alpine Linux 3.7.0 Released
- nikolay 9y agoNew Features and Noteworthy New Packages - Support for EFI; - Support in the installer for the GRUB bootloader Significant Updates - GCC 6.4 - LLVM 5.0 - Go 1.9 - Node.js 8.9 (LTS) - Perl 5.26 - PostgreSQL 10 - Rust 1.22
- bartkmq 9y agoWhat does EFI support mean? I remember booting Alpine on an UEFI system a few months before this update so it can't be support for that. Is it maybe related to efistub?
- jbb67 9y agoLove alpine and it seeming less bloated than most other alternatives :)
- nindalf 9y agoI know Alpine is a great fit for any container env but I'm wondering, is it used elsewhere?
- harrygeez 9y agoI know a few people who actually use it as their main OS
- majewsky 9y agoIndeed. Just this week, someone in my hackerspace approached me who had just switched to Alpine on his notebook, and he convinced me to quickly add support for Alpine to the minimalistic configuration management tool that I'm maintaining.
- redbeard0x0a 9y agoI'm guessing this is the CM tool he was talking about: http://holocm.org/ http://holocm.org/
- Lio 9y agoI _think_ it's used by Synology as the basis of their DSM storage OS. At least you can install apk packages so that is my assumption.
- ausjke 9y agonot sure about this as Alpine is kind of x86 only. yes it has some armhf and ppc64 versions however it seems x86 is the main target to be run on. on the other hand, debian, openwrt etc are built for multi-arch all the time.
- justincormack 9y agoNo, arm, arm64 are well supported for physical install. I think ppc64le and s390x are mainly targeting container installs, but probably work for physical installs too.
- cristobal23 9y agoI used Alpine as the guest OS in VirtualBox VMs. It was useful when I was learning about Docker. It helped me compare containers to virtual machines.
- SeamusBrady 9y agoI use Alpine for the VM at the heart of my GPL WordPress tool InstantWP (https://www.instantwp.com https://www.instantwp.com). I spent six months reviewing all the smaller distributions of Linux until I found one that would boot fast enough to be usable with QEMU. It works like a charm and i rock solid. I highly recommend it.
- gvalkov 9y agoI think it's great on the Raspberry Pi [0]. It boots quickly, has a low footprint and runs in diskless mode by default [1]. I most recently used Alpine and a RPi to make an appliance of sorts, that would wait for the SSID of my Olympus WiFi-enabled camera (it acts as an AP) to show up and then sync all new photos automatically [2]. [0]: https://wiki.alpinelinux.org/wiki/Raspberry_Pi [1]: https://wiki.alpinelinux.org/wiki/Installation#Installation_Handbook [2]: https://github.com/gvalkov/olympus-photosync-server
- braderhart 9y agoGreat project based on Alpine: https://postmarketos.org https://postmarketos.org
- snvzz 9y agoNotable because it uses musl and does some hardening, such as building everything as PIE. Musl is a promising glibc replacement.
- j605 9y agoPIE is default in a lot of distributions now.(https://bugs.archlinux.org/task/49791 https://bugs.archlinux.org/task/49791)
- nikolay 9y agoUnfortunately, Musl is a bit slower in things like memory allocation, etc.
- snvzz 9y agoSure, it's slower than glibc at some things. And faster at others. http://www.etalabs.net/compare_libcs.html http://www.etalabs.net/compare_libcs.html I believe it better overall.
- nikolay 9y agoAs I've seen the above comparison already, glibc is the one better overall when size doesn't really matter.
- Sir_Cmpwn 9y agoAlpine is really good. I've been slowly migrating my boxen to it. Just deployed 3 dedis recently running it, a handful of VMs, and I'm installing it on my laptop before I go for holiday travel. I still have a couple of gripes but they've done a damn good job. Note: I use the vanilla kernel distribution.
- oblio 9y agoIsn't the first thing you do to install GNU coreutils? Busybox is neat, but unusable for day to day usage, IMO.
- Sir_Cmpwn 9y agoFuck no, GNU coreutils is awful.
- rufugee 9y agoCare to elaborate?
- Sir_Cmpwn 9y agoGNU coreutils and the broader GNU operating system is an extreme exercise in bloated and overengineered software. It's the antithesis of everything I like Alpine for. Give me a POSIX coreutils and I'm happy. Actually using any of GNU's extensions is an antipattern.
- oblio 9y agoI don't really care about anti-patterns, I care about usability. They're usable, full of features I use and have nice, standardized long form flags, especially good for scripts.
- Sir_Cmpwn 9y agoNo, they're especially awful for scripts. The only place where extensions are maybe appropriate is ad-hoc at your shell. Your scripts are non-portable. Suck it up and learn the POSIX flags, they're not difficult. If you can't, then you aren't really in Alpine's target audience anyway.
- frik 9y agoLove that Alpine Linux uses OpenRC, and has no plans to switch to systemd. https://forum.alpinelinux.org/forum/general-discussion/alpine-plans-systemd https://forum.alpinelinux.org/forum/general-discussion/alpin... Edit: why downvote, I like it that way, leaner OpenRC is great
- dbcurtis 9y agoYes, I'm also a fan of OpenRC. I have always found it intuitive. Alpine aims to have a lean footprint and be highly configurable. I can't imagine using systemd for small-footprint systems, especially since systemd somewhat limits options for system organization. As to the downvote, just consider it someone saying: "Your opinion is inconsistent with my agenda, and therefore invalid." It's meaningless.
- gvalkov 9y agoSystemd is not orthogonal to lean and small-footprint systems. This is a good presentation on its use in embedded environments[0]. [0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ERS1OSOTGpg
- gvalkov 9y agoI've written many init scripts for SysV, upstart, OpenRC and FreeBSD's rc, but I've found that systemd's service units to be by far the cleanest and quickest way to muster up an init script (with FreeBSD's rc in second place).
- bartkmq 9y agoAlpine is a nice if you're looking for a really small os with an large number of ported packages. I use it as a rescue system for my main linux os. Only negative thing I can think of is that that their support forums¹ are full of spam. [1] https://forum.alpinelinux.org/forum/4 https://forum.alpinelinux.org/forum/4
- hgl 9y agoGlad to see updated packages. I wonder if they should be favored over those offered by official Docker images when used in Docker? For example, what are the pros and cons between using official Docker go image vs creating a custom image from an alpine image with apk add go?
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- gtirloni 9y agoI think I read somewhere that Alpine will update packages only when there are security fixes. I can't find a link to share, sorry. If you're on Alpine Linux 3.6, you get access to Node.js 6.10.3 (or 7.10.1 in the nodejs-current package) If you depend on targeting very specific versions of your runtime stack and also want to use Alpine, check if your stack offers official images based off of Alpine. For instance, node:8-alpine, python:3-alpine, etc. It seems most projects will offer Alpine-based Docker images these days. They should update faster and more frequently, but that depends on each project.
- eikenberry 9y agoThere is an official Docker go/alpine image and their Dockerfiles are public, so if you wanted to create your own you could and it'd be exactly the same.
- acejam 9y agoMany of the official Docker images have Alpine variants. Check the tags of the image you're using.
- brianwawok 9y agoSo I am using Alpine and generally like it. One question that perhaps someone on this thread will know... why does it cache DNS differently from Ubuntu, and is there a way to fix it? My app has a domain name for the database sever that I pass to Psycopg2.. say foobar.something.google-cloud.internal. It resolves to the private IP of my PostgreSQL sever. The problem, is EVERY SINGLE database query is querying the DNS. I can sometimes push 10,000 DNS queries per second. 9,990 of those are for the same stupid database server. Kubernetes runs it's own DNS server which takes the load, but sometimes they get overwhelmed a bit. I am obviously doing something wrong, but not sure the path to explore down. If I can fix this, then alpine is working pretty amazing for me :)
- tbrock 9y agoYou can fix this by installing and running a local dns server like dnsmasq to cache for you: apk install dnsmasq See this: https://github.com/gliderlabs/docker-alpine/blob/master/docs/caveats.md#dns https://github.com/gliderlabs/docker-alpine/blob/master/docs...
- brianwawok 9y agoFantastic will try this edit - so far no results, must need some other change to turn it on...
- mrighele 9y agoIf you're still in search for a solution: dnsmasq acts as a caching dns server listening on your loopback device, so you probably need to change the dns server of your lan/wifi to 127.0.0.1 (or whatever address dnsmasq is configured to listen at), and also set what external dns servers should be used by dnsmasq. Those are usually not setup properly by default.
- tsuraan 9y agotbrock gave the work-around, but as for the "why", it's probably because Debian uses glibc for its libc, while Alpine uses musl. musl aims to be a much more compliant libc than glibc, so when you tell it to look up a name, it probably always does so. Like tbrock said, installing a local dns cache should help (or, failing that, an /etc/hosts entry?).
- matt_wulfeck 9y agoIn theory I’ve liked the container sizes. The problem is the moment you need to do something useful with it ( I can stall python’s Requests library) the image size balloons up and becomes just another container.
- xena 9y agoUse something like https://github.com/box-builder/box https://github.com/box-builder/box?
- braderhart 9y agoReally hoping that Alpine will come through with an official Amazon AMI, or with instructions that actually work on how to make your own.