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The Alpine Linux development team announced today the release and general availability of Alpine Linux 3.18 as the latest stable version for this security-oriented Linux distribution using musl, BusyBox, and OpenRC instead of the more commonly used GNU technologies.
Arriving five and a half months after Alpine Linux 3.17, the Alpine Linux 3.18 release is powered by the long-term supported Linux 6.1 LTS kernel series, which comes with signed kernel modules.
The devs note the fact that verified kernel modules are not enforced by default, which means that third-party modules with AKMS (Alpine Kernel Module Support) will still work.
Alpine Linux 3.18 is also powered by the musl libc 1.2.4 C standard library, which comes with a TCP fallback in the DNS resolver. Also included in this release are Python 3.11, Ruby 3.2, Node.js 20.1, Go 1.20, and Rust 1.69.
The devs note the fact that Alpine Linux 3.18 ships Python pre-compiled files in the pyc format in separate packages. Users can avoid installing these packages if they want to save space by running the apk add !pyc command.
Another interesting change in this release is experimental support for unattended installs via tiny-cloud bootstrapper, which performs critical initialization tasks for cloud instances during their first boot.
Last but not least, all the packages included in the new Alpine Linux release for 64-bit (x86_64), 32-bit (x86), and PowerPC 64-bit Little Endian (ppc64le) architectures have been linked with DT_RELR, which should reduce the size of compiled binaries.
For those who want their Alpine Linux installation with a popular desktop environment, they should also know that this release brings support for the latest GNOME 44 and KDE Plasma 5.27 LTS desktop releases.
You can download Alpine Linux 3.18 right now from the official website as Standard, Extended, Netboot, Raspberry Pi, Generic ARM, and Mini Root Filesystem editions for 64-bit (x86_64), AArch64 (ARM64), ARMv7, 32-bit (x86), PowerPC 64-bit Little Endian (ppc64le), and IBM System z (s390x) architectures.
Existing Alpine Linux users will be able to upgrade their installations using the default package management system by running the apk upgrade --available command.
Last updated 12 months ago
