The release of Alpine Linux 3.24 is available, a minimalist distribution built on the Musl system library and the BusyBox utility set. The distribution features enhanced security requirements and is compiled with SSP (Stack Smashing Protection). OpenRC is used as the initialization system, and its own package manager apk is used for package management. Alpine is used to create official Docker container images and is utilized in the PostmarketOS project. Bootable ISO images (x86_64, x86, armhf, aarch64, armv7, ppc64le, s390x, riscv64, and loongarch64) are prepared in six variants: standard (352 MB), network bootable (374 MB), extended (1 GB), for of virtual machines (66 MB), minirootfs (4 MB), and for the Xen hypervisor (1 GB).
In the new release:
- The installer (setup-alpine) has added support for the Limine bootloader, which supports network booting via IPv6.
- Packages containing the COSMIC desktop environment developed by System76 in Rust have been added to the 'community' repository.
- Packages that use GTK 2 and Qt5 libraries, which could not be ported to current branches of GTK and Qt, have been removed. GTK 2 is planned to be removed in the next release.
- Packages with new versions of graphical environments GNOME 50.2, KDE Plasma 6.6, LXQt 2.4.0, and Sway 1.12 have been proposed.
- Package versions have been updated, for example, releases of GRUB 2.14,
LLVM 22, Rust 1.96, Go 1.26, Qt 6.11, wlroots 0.20, nginx 1.30, Xen 4.21. The Linux kernel package continues to ship with branch 6.18. - For new installations, an optional feature has been proposed to merge all executable files and libraries from root directories into the /usr partition (/bin, /sbin, and /lib* are unified with corresponding directories inside /usr and formatted via symbolic links to them). To enable this merging during installation, the environment variable BOOTSTRAP_USR_MERGED should be set before calling the setup-disk utility. For existing systems, the merge-usr package can be used for merging.
- The build system setuptools has been updated to version 82.0.0, which removes the pkg_resources module.
- The qemu-binfmt service from the qemu-openrc package has been deprecated; instead, the binfmt.d directory should be used for placing configuration files along with the binfmt service.
- Packages with GTK 3.0 have been moved from the 'main' repository to 'community'.
Source: opennet.ru
