Available release of Alpine Linux 3.23, a minimalistic distribution built on the basis of the Musl system library and the BusyBox set of utilities. The distribution has increased security requirements and is built with SSP (Stack Smashing Protection) protection. OpenRC is used as the initialization system, and its own apk package manager is used to manage packages. Alpine is used to build official Docker container images and is used in the PostmarketOS project. Bootable iso images (x86_64, x86, armhf, aarch64, armv7, ppc64le, s390x, riscv64 and loongarch64) are prepared in six versions: standard (344 MB), downloadable over the network (361 MB), extended (1 GB), for virtual machines (67 MB), minirootfs (4 MB) and for the Xen hypervisor (1 GB).
In new release:
- After five years of development, the apk 3.0 package manager is published. The Alpine Linux 3.23 version includes new apk utilities, but for now the second version of the package format and index continues to be used (the transition to the third version is planned in one of the next releases).
Among the changes in apk 3.0:
- A new package format that supports the zstg compression algorithm and digital signatures based on the new algorithm, and also provides the ability to verify data in the package manager database using original signatures packages.
- Support for the use of new hashing algorithms in the index (SHA-256, SHA-512).
- Support for FTP, the first version of the package format and md5 hashes has been removed.
- Added check for compliance of the installed package architecture with the system architecture.
- To separate the output of scripts and the apk utility, the prefix ‘*’ is now added to the output of scripts.
- Support for defining and using variables has been