Minimal, systemd-free Alpine Linux releases version 3.16
- Reference: 1653562028
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2022/05/26/alpine_linux_316_released/
- Source link:
Version [1]3.16.0 is worth a look, especially if you want to broaden your skills.
Alpine is interesting because it's not just another me-too distro. It bucks a lot of the trends in modern Linux, and while it's not the easiest to set up, it's a great deal easier to get it working than it was a few releases ago.
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The version number sounds like a small step, but its version numbering is a little different, too. Alpine Linux 3.0.0 came out way back in 2014, meaning that the number after the first decimal is a significant step. The project describes this as "the first in the 3.16 stable series" , meaning that soon 3.16.1 will appear, then 3.16.2 and so on.
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This version has better support for NVMe disks, and includes a new script to make it easier to install a desktop. The installation program, while remaining extremely minimal, now adds user accounts, including readable names, and can import SSH keys for them too.
As with most new distro versions, it also updates lots of core components, including a swath of current programming languages, and a choice of GNOME 42, KDE 5.24, or Xfce 4.16. This version also drops Python 2 and PHP 7.
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Although systemd is [6]growing and extending its reach into more of the Linux OS , Alpine is systemd-free: it uses OpenRC instead. Most of the major Linux distros use either RPM or DEB packages: Alpine has its own, APK. Almost every mainstream distro uses the [7]GNU project's C library, glibc , but Alpine doesn't: it uses the lightweight [8]musl instead. Most desktop distros use a common shell such as bash , but Alpine doesn't, favouring the simpler [9]busybox , mostly seen in phones and routers. This betrays its distant origins as a fork of the Linux Embedded Appliance Framework, or [10]LEAF , which started out in the 1990s as a single-floppy-diskette distro to turn an old 486 PC into a router.
Lightweight
This means that Alpine is very minimal: it uses less disk and less storage than most distros, and it installs quicker, too. It can be configured to boot and run entirely from RAM, so that after it's running, you can remove the boot medium. It can act as a Xen hypervisor host: Xen 4.16 is included, or KVM if you prefer.
This lightness and flexibility is why Docker [11]chose Alpine Linux as its default . If you run Docker on a non-Linux host, for example in [12]Docker Desktop on Windows and macOS , then your containers are probably running on Alpine Linux.
Native versions are available for 32- and 64-bit x86 and Arm, plus PPC64le and IBM s390x; [13]MIPS64 was dropped in the last release .
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Alpine Linux's Xfce desktop shows a few missing icons, but it works
If you wish, though, you can ignore all that stuff and install Alpine as a normal, full-function graphical desktop PC OS.
The Reg FOSS desk gave both the x86-32 and x86-64 versions quick whirls on VirtualBox and an elderly laptop. The installation process is ultra-minimal: the OS boots to a command prompt, you log in as root , and if you're using Wi-Fi, you then have to install and configure WLAN support manually.
Then you can run the setup-alpine tool, which will format the hard disk – no dual-booting out of the box here – and build a minimal bootable system. Fortunately, if you need optional extras such as Wi-Fi support, there is a 750MB "Extended ISO" available which contains such additional tools. The standard ISO is under 150MB, and doesn't contain much: you will need a working broadband connection, and we advise you to plug in an Ethernet cable.
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Then, you reboot and continue setup, installing a desktop if you want one, and installing whatever tools and apps you need. Fortunately, the [16]documentation is good, because it's not a trivial job.
A very convenient new feature in this version is a setup-desktop tool which will install one of three desktops (GNOME, KDE Plasma or Xfce) in a single step.
In Alpine 3.15 this was a multi-stage manual process, and to be honest, a few years ago, getting a GUI going at all defeated your correspondent completely. The new installer even installs Firefox 100 for you, which is handy: you will probably need it to Google what to do next. Such as, say, manually installing network-manager , or adding sound support, or installing LibreOffice.
Note that being based on a different C library means that many off-the-peg Linux binaries won't work. Alpine does include an optional dpkg tool for installing Debian and Ubuntu packages, but the problem is that proprietary Linux apps such as Google Chrome depend on glibc and a whole host of other bits of Debian which just aren't there on Alpine.
This is the first version of a new release, and we did encounter a few glitches. For example, the x86-64 ISO won't boot from a [17]Ventoy USB key , although it installed fine into a VM. The x86-32 version worked perfectly. Once we installed Xfce, some submenus of the Applications menu were missing their icons, showing just a placeholder – which also affected a VM upgraded from Alpine 3.15.
The ordinary user account created during setup couldn't log in from a graphical session, because the setup program hadn't created a home directory.
[18]Version 251 of systemd coming soon to a Linux distro near you
[19]Microsoft freshens up its in-house container Linux, CBL-Mariner
[20]The joy of six: Microsoft emits latest preview of .NET Core 3 with plenty of pipes, perfs, loads...
[21]It's your Loki day: The Reg takes Elementary OS Jólnir for a quick test drive
If you know your way around Linux, these are mostly trivial details, but such niggles mean we wouldn't recommend Alpine to a Linux newbie.
We installed the 32-bit edition on one of the oldest machines we had to hand, a Thinkpad W500 with a Core 2 Duo CPU and a mere 100GB mechanical hard disk. Everything went fine, it installed in minutes, and for a 14-year-old laptop, the result was fast and responsive, and boots from cold in well under a minute.
It's quite impressive to see a 2022 distro turn this old box back into the powerful workstation it was at the start of the Credit Crunch.
Alpine is an unusual little distro in several ways, including being unusually small and simple, and once you learn how to configure what you need, it works as well as more conventional distros that need five to ten times more resources. This version is easier to install than ever before, but barely any bigger. We are impressed. ®
Get our [22]Tech Resources
[1] https://www.alpinelinux.org/posts/Alpine-3.16.0-released.html
[2] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/oses&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=2&c=2Yo@kH8ELplw7KTYprJfmkAAAAMI&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D2%26raptor%3Dcondor%26pos%3Dtop%26test%3D0
[3] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/oses&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44Yo@kH8ELplw7KTYprJfmkAAAAMI&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[4] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/oses&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=3&c=33Yo@kH8ELplw7KTYprJfmkAAAAMI&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D3%26raptor%3Deagle%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[5] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/oses&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44Yo@kH8ELplw7KTYprJfmkAAAAMI&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[6] https://www.theregister.com/2022/05/24/version_251_of_systemd_released/
[7] https://www.theregister.com/2021/06/16/glibc_gnulib_fsf_copyright/
[8] https://musl.libc.org/
[9] https://busybox.net/
[10] http://leaf.sourceforge.net/
[11] https://www.theregister.com/2017/04/18/docker_linuxkit_moby/
[12] https://www.theregister.com/2021/08/31/docker_desktop_no_longer_free/
[13] https://www.theregister.com/2021/11/25/alpine_3_15/
[14] https://regmedia.co.uk/2022/05/25/alpine-linux-316.jpg
[15] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/oses&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=3&c=33Yo@kH8ELplw7KTYprJfmkAAAAMI&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D3%26raptor%3Deagle%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[16] https://wiki.alpinelinux.org/wiki/Installation
[17] https://www.theregister.com/2021/12/10/friday_foss_fest/
[18] https://www.theregister.com/2022/05/24/version_251_of_systemd_released/
[19] https://www.theregister.com/2022/03/17/microsoft_updates_its_inhouse_linux/
[20] https://www.theregister.com/2019/06/13/microsoft_dotnet_core_3_preview_6/
[21] https://www.theregister.com/2021/12/21/elementary_os_61/
[22] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/
Re: Under a minute?
What 1980's machine could boot Unix from cold in seconds ?
Re: Under a minute?
Maybe they meant booting from ROM chips?
Re: Under a minute?
Who said unix? Many OS could boot in seconds, Qnx could, I believe 10 years ago they were showing off cold boot in less than a second on atom.
I saw an Amiga fully boot from cold in about 4 seconds in 1990.
There is really no excuse in the “well they were way more basic” hardware is magnitudes faster now and to boot, they shouldn’t be any more complicated, we’re not talking about the software you run afterwards we’re talking about an interface to launch that software. It should be basic. That the “ultra minimal cut back” OS is so far from being that basic is the problem. To defend something taking so long to boot is nuts to me. Would you defend a Game taking 30s to display every frame because oh well it’s complex, and it’s doing loads of stuff?
Re: Under a minute?
I partially agree.
1 minute is indeed quite slow for a PC that powerful. It was a Core 2 Duo! I remember when these things were trendy because they were in the newer mac minis. Many are 64-bit and they are dual core. I still use my trusty Thinkpad x61 with the core2duo and it boots OpenBSD in ~12 seconds which is a platform that doesn't even focus on boot speed.
However computers in the 80s were much simpler than Linux. Heck going a little later to DOS and that barely needed to boot anything.
Re: Under a minute?
"Rebooting from cold on a relatively new computer should take seconds (or even 1 second),"
It is not clear what exactly the "under a minute" referred to - did this include BIOS/UEFI initialisation/"POST" time? I suspect so.
What did (the installed) Alpine boot from? Perhaps the author was booting off a (slow) USB stick?
It is likely the author did a run-from-ram install of Alpine (rather than a run-from-disk) and that is likely to be slower due to having to load the OS from squashfs and unpack it into a ram-based tmpfs.
Alpine in general is actually *very* quick to boot.
Basically there's insufficient data available to analyse/understand the "under a minute" phrase.
Re: Under a minute?
[Author here]
I did specify what I was using, but apparently I should have been clearer.
I said:
«
We installed the 32-bit edition on one of the oldest machines we had to hand, a Thinkpad W500 with a Core 2 Duo CPU and a mere 100GB mechanical hard disk.
»
And
«
a 14-year-old laptop, the result was fast and responsive, and boots from cold in well under a minute.
»
I though that was specific enough. Apparently not. My apologies.
It's an old machine. I've tried Win7, Win10, Ubuntu Unity, Pop!_OS and several other distros on it. Linux normally takes a couple of minutes, and Windows longer, to boot on it.
As I said, the machine is from the start of the Credit Crunch. That, for clarity, was 2008. And as I also said, this is with a slow, small, spinning hard disk, not an SSD.
That is a cold boot, from switched off to the desktop.
Also, as I said, the x86-64 edition failed to boot from Ventoy. So this is the 32-bit edition, meaning it is limited to 3-and-a-bit gig of RAM. The machine has 8GB, the max it can take.
Additional info: the machine's discrete nVidia GPU was turned off in the BIOS, because the laptop's cooling fans are intermittently unreliable, so I wanted it to run as cool as possible. It's using the Intel GPU in the Centrino 2 chipset.
Why ?
Same thought. I'd guess for people who like a challenge and tinkering with Linux? Other than that, folks with a masochistic tendency. Not very practical in the real world is it?
Alpine is one of the better ones
Alpine is an ultra stripped down distro, perfect for learning how Linux functions at the core as an O/S without all that chuff in bigger more fancy distros. Alpine is also perfect for firing up dozens of VMs as it's so low resource, I've had 27 Alpine Docker containers running simultaneously on a bog standard 32GB laptop when I needed to test some simple scaling code.
Alpine is a genuinely useful distro rather than just another overfed clone of Debian or the RH core.
Re: Alpine is one of the better ones
a bog standard 32GB laptop
Maybe I'm showing my age but 32GB in a laptop feels like more than bog standard
Why? Docker
RTFA...
At a guess:
1. No systemd
2. Minimal-ish resource requirements in this day and age
3. Minimal packages installed
4. Quicker than setting up/compiling Gentoo from scratch
5. No systemd
6. Why not?
If I were still working in non-Windows shop, this sounds like the sort of distro I'd want for servers. It sounds a lot like the old CentOS server "distro". The lack of glibc might be a bitch sometimes, though.
It's the ideal sort of thing for older laptops and desktops, or a Raspberry Pi and the like, where one wants to retain resources and not have them consumed by a behemoth distro. Where "less for you means more for me" allows the use of kit which wouldn't otherwise be suitable.
Alpine Linux is indeed different
-> if you want to broaden your skills
Broadening skills is a good thing and I encourage it. My opinion: we learn more from when things go wrong than when they go right. I am in favour of skilled Linux (or UNIX generally) users.
-> Alpine is interesting because it's not just another me-too distro
I prefer the term YALD to "another me-too distro".
-> being unusually small and simple
That is a good thing. Far too many YALDs are complex and bloated. They are near copies of each other excepting a few insignificant bells and whistles. Alpine is a worthy distro.
Re: Alpine Linux is indeed different
It's horses for courses.
Some people want to broaden their skills, explore new avenues and try out new things.
This distro looks like it will fill their needs nicely.
25 years ago I was that person, tired of all the Windows nonsense I was excited to discover Linux. I bought a copy of Red Hat 5 and I was away. New things to learn and new ways of getting things done.
That was then. Now I am retired and Linux is just a tool I use to get to places I want to go to. Computing is no longer a job or a hobby. Nowadays I want things to "just work" so I'll stick to PCLinuxOS. It works, is simple to use and configure so I'll let those people looking for a challenge have a look at Alpine.
Isn't it a wonderful thing that we have a choice when choosing a distro that we can usually find one that we feel comfortable with?
Re: Isn't it a wonderful thing that we have a choice
Well, indeed. But if your preference is that you only want to be able to choose from fewer choices, then you might just place yourself in a tricky philosophical position :-)
Re: Isn't it a wonderful thing that we have a choice
"a tricky philosophical position"
It only seems tricky to those who want more choices. Painting yourself into a corner is not a problem at all if you are happy never to leave that corner.
For people asking "why?" the answer is that unless you run a lot of containers/VMs then this is not for you.
Sure you can run it as your daily distro with a desktop, but to do so is missing the point. It's the perfect starting point for minimal containers to your applications, cloud or otherwise.
Alpine as a server
"For people asking "why?" the answer is that unless you run a lot of containers/VMs then this is not for you."
That statement is misleading. Alpine is a good lightweight Linux distro if you want to run servers, whether acting as a Container/VM host or as a DNS/DHCP/file server etc.
To date Alpine has not targetted desktop use, rather its original direction was for "servers". In more recent times it has become synonymous with Docker containers, but again that was not its original direction.
This new release has added installer support for graphical desktops, so don't (yet) expect a polished desktop distro.
Under a minute?
Rebooting from cold on a relatively new computer should take seconds (or even 1 second), To be “under a minute” should not be an impressive statement. Computers in the 80s could boot from cold in seconds from the slowest of hard drives.