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The Alpine Linux development team announced today the release and general availability of Alpine Linux 3.13, a new major series bringing numerous new features and enhancements.
Coming about eight months after the Alpine Linux 3.12 series, Alpine Linux 3.13 is powered by the latest and greatest Linux 5.10 LTS kernel series and introduces ifupdown-ng network device manager as a replacement for BusyBox’s ifupdown and provide users with a flexible ifup/ifdown implementation.
This release also improves Wi-Fi support in the setup scripts, introduces support for the latest and greatest PHP 8.0 general-purpose scripting language, as well as initial support for the cloud-init industry standard multi-distribution method for cross-platform cloud instance initialization.
Talking about cloud computing, Alpine Linux 3.13 is the first release of the security-oriented and lightweight GNU/Linux distribution to provide official cloud images supporting only the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (AWS EC2) web service at this time, but support for more cloud hosting services will be available in future releases.
Among other noteworthy changes, the Node.js LTS implementation is now compiled with -O2 instead of -Os for a performance boost, along with support for using full ICU data if the icu-data package is installed in the system.
Under the hood, Alpine Linux 3.13 is based on musl 1.2 and Busybox 1.32.1, and includes numerous up-to-date core components like GCC 10.2.1, Git 2.30.0, Knot DNS 3.0.3, MariaDB 10.5.8, Node.js 14.15.4, Nextcloud 20.0.4, PostgreSQL 13.1, QEMU 5.2.0, Xen 4.14.1, Zabbix 5.2.3, and OpenZFS 2.0.1.
You can download Alpine Linux 3.13 right now from the official website for various architectures, including 64-bit (x86_64), 32-bit (x86), AArch64 (ARM 64-bit), PowerPC 64-bit Little Endian (PPC64le), IBM System z (s390x), ARMhf, ARMv7, and MIPS64, in multiple flavors.
Users already running Alpine Linux 3.12 or a previous release can upgrade using the built-in package management systems. However, if you’re using Alpine Linux on ARMhf, ARMv7 or x86 platforms, you should keep in mind that musl 1.2 changed the definition of time_t to 64-bits.
Last updated 3 years ago
