14 DAY TRIAL // After no less than five release candidates, the Alpine Linux 3.9 operating system is now ready for mass deployments as the development team lead by Natanael Copa announced the final release.
Alpine Linux 3.9 comes six months after the 3.8 series to add new features and more enhancements to the musl/BusyBox-based security-oriented GNU/Linux distribution. Highlights of this release include support for ARMv7 architectures, the replace of LibreSSL with OpenSSL, and better support for the GRUB bootloader.
"GRUB users should check if their config is generated correctly and have emergency boot media prepared," reads the release announcement, which also notes the fact that the "moodloop" option for specifying when a SquashFS file system gets mounted to /.modloop is now signed in Alpine Linux 3.9.
Updated components, other changes
Under the hood, Alpine Linux 3.9 is powered by the latest long-term supported kernel series, Linux 4.19, and includes up-to-date core components like GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) 8.2.0, BusyBox 1.29, musl libc 1.1.20, Go 1.11.5, LXC 3.1, PostgreSQL 11.1, Node.js 10.14.2, Zabbix 4.0.3, Crystal 0.27, and Nextcloud 15.0.2.
Also changed in this release is the removal of the 32-bit binaries for the Mozilla Firefox web browser, which is now available only on the 64-bit (x86_64) architecture due to Rust. You can download Alpine Linux 3.9 right now through our free software portal in various editions for a wide range of hardware architectures.
Available Alpine Linux editions include Standard Edition for 64-bit, 32-bit, IBM System Z, and PowerPC 64-bit LE architectures, Extended and Virtual Editions for 64-bit and 32-bit architectures, Netboot and Mini Root Filesystem Editions for 64-bit, 32-bit, ARMhf, AArch64 (ARM 64-bit), IBM System Z, and PowerPC 64-bit LE architectures, and Xen Edition for 64-bit architectures.