You can download Alpine Linux right now from Softpedia

Jun 5, 2014 09:21 GMT  ·  By

The Alpine Team has announced that Alpine Linux 3.0.0, a security-oriented, lightweight Linux distribution based on musl libc and Busybox, is now available for download.

Alpine Linux is not a distribution for the faint of heart. This is an operating system the relies pretty much on the command line, so if you want to make use of it you will need to be familiar with CLI and all that it entails.

The distribution began its life as a fork of the LEAF project, but it evolved a lot in the past few years and became an important OS. According to its developers, it was designed with security in mind. It has proactive security features, such as PaX and SSP, that prevent security holes from being exploited.

“Its network configuration is similar to Debian's and its package management is, in some ways, similar to Debian's APT or RedHat's yum, the BSDs' pkg_* commands (apk_* under Alpine), and Arch Linux's PKGBUILDs (APKBUILD under Alpine).”

“Also, if you've ever used a BusyBox-based system before, you would know that its applets do not support all of the features of their GNU/Linux counterparts. However, in an effort to make the system run like any other, the Alpine developers have contributed a number of enhancements to the BusyBox project,” said the developers on the official website.

Alpine 3.0.0 is a very big update and it’s quite larger than most of the previous versions. For example, the Linux kernel used by default is now 3.14.5, lxc has been updated to version 1.0.3, qemu has been updated to version 2.0.0, asterisk has been updated to version 12.3.0, openssh has been updated to version 6.6p1, openjdk7 has been added by default, and varnish is now at version 4.0.0.

When users boot the system for the first time they will notice that there is no default desktop installed. Most of the tasks that can be performed with Alpine Linux can be done without the help of a desktop environment, but you can install one from the repositories.

If you do that, you will also notice that the distribution comes with Mozilla Firefox 29.0.1, Gnumeric 1.12.8, Evince 3.12, VLC 2.14, GIMP 2.8.10, claws-mail 3.10.0, hexchat 2.9.6.1, InkScape 0.48.4, and a few others.

Also, the developers fixed a number of bugs, and the support for utf8, all time zones, and the full RELRO build is now much better.

The complete changelog can be found on the official website. You can download Alpine Linux 3.0.0 right now from Softpedia.