14 DAY TRIAL // A new stable version of Natanael Copa’s security-oriented Alpine Linux operating system has been released with support for Raspberry Pi single-board computers and various updated components.
Alpine Linux 3.8 is out as the most advanced version of the GNU/Linux distribution, bringing, for the first time, an ARM64 (AArch64) image designed for deploying the operating system on Raspberry Pi devices. Best of all, users can now install Alpine Linux on the recently released Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+ SBC, which features a Quad-core 1.4GHz 64-bit CPU, faster Ethernet, and dual-band Wi-Fi.
Also new in Alpine Linux 3.8 is support for IBM System z (s390x) architectures in the ISO image, which can also be used for KVM (Kernel-based virtual machine) installations, thanks to IBM who provided the developer with the required hardware. Furthermore, this release adds support for the Crystal language, as well as support for NetBoot installs on all architectures.
Updated components
As expected with any new Alpine Linux stable release, version 3.8 ships with numerous updated components, among which we can mention Node.js 8.11 LTS, Ruby 2.5, JRuby 9.2, PHP 7.2, OCaml 4.06, Rust 1.26, Go 1.10, R 3.5, as well as GHC (Glasgow Haskell Compiler) 8.4. Alpine Linux 3.8 is powered by the long-term supported Linux 4.14 kernel. Details about the contributions are available in the release notes.
For those unfamiliar with Alpine Linux, it’s a lightweight and text-based operating system oriented towards security applications. It’s built on the musl and libc libraries, and uses the BusyBox utility by default for general system administration. Existing users can update their installations using the distro’s built-in update system, but for new installs you should download the Alpine Linux 3.8 release right now through our web portal.