October 10, 2022

Episode 3:08: Scaling the Alpine

1 hour 15 minutes

Coming up in this episode

We're diskless

We take a LEAF out of the history book

We climb the Alpine mountain

Pick a very small editor

And we don our hoodies

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0:00 Cold Open

1:30 No Disks for You!

10:35 1997, LRP

11:43 2000, No More Money

13:09 2001, LRP Struggles

13:59 2003, LRP Put to Rest + LEAF and GNAP

14:58 2004, GNAP v0.5

15:04 2005, A Linux Powered Integrated Network Engine

16:18 2006, Alpine 1.4 | 2007, Alpine 1.5 and 1.6

16:37 2008, Alpine 2.0 Added Busybox

16:54 2009, Alpine 1.8 and 1.9

17:13 2010, Alpine 1.10 and 2.0

18:05 2011, Alpine 2.2 and 2.3

18:28 2012, Alpine 2.4 and 2.5

18:51 2013, Alpine and the Container Renaissance

20:11 2014, Alpine 3.0 and musl libc

20:43 2015, Alpine 3.2, 3.3 and Some Restructuring

21:19 2016, Alpine 3.4, 3.5 and OpenSSL

21:55 2017, Alpine 3.6, 3.7 and PostmarketOS

22:39 2018, Alpine 3.8 and Raspberry Pi 3 Support

23:01 2019, Alpine 3.9, 3.10 and 3.11

24:08 2020, Alpine 3.12 and the Last LEAF

24:28 2021, Alpine 3.13, 3.14 and 3.15

25:10 2022, Alpine 3.16 and the End of the History

26:45 What is Alpine, Really?

41:34 Our Thoughts on Alpine

1:04:07 Next Time! More Text Ed and a New Distro

1:13:58 Stinger

Banter

Disks! They're dead, Jim.

Dan's 3TB Seagate - not noted for reliability but was reliable.

Leo's 240GB Adata SU630

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Alpine Linux the History

Back in 1997, Dave Cineage created the Linux Router Project, or LRP.

The Linux Embedded Appliance Framework, or LEAF project was started

Oxygen

EigerStein

The Linux Router Project was done

The LEAF project was still there

August of 2005, Natanael Copa, while working for a non-profit company on VPNs and firewalls, announced a new distribution on the linux.leaf.devel mailing list.

Alpine originally stood for A Linux Powered Integrated Network Engine.

The earlier versions are a little cloudy, but we see Alpine 1.4 being developed in 2006, 1.5 in 2007, Alpine 1.6 released on April 30th of 2007 and the switch to development of 1.7 in the days after.

Alpine 2.0, the then development branch, first commit "added busybox"

Alpine 1.9 - OpenRC shipped and able to install on hard disks.

A new website is launched

Alpine Linux 2.0 is released

The team announced the Alpine Linux Forum.

Alpine 3.0 is released, and uClibc is dropped in favor of musl libc.

Alpine 3.2 is released and included the MATE desktop.

Alpine 3.3 is released with big renames of the editions that already existed.

Alpine 3.4 is released with support for running within VM's, better DNS support and running on the Linux Kernel's Long Term Support release 4.4.

Alpine 3.5 is released and this marks the first version to drop OpenSSL for LibreSSL.

Alpine 3.6 is released with support for 64-bit PowerPC and IBM z Systems.

Alpine 3.7 is released and now supports EFI and GRUB.

Alpine 3.8 is released a bit behind schedule and marks the only release of the year.

Alpine 3.9 is released improved GRUB support, initial support for the newish ARMv7 and the switch back to OpenSSL.

Alpine 3.10 is released with lightdm for login and display management, which shows a renewed interest in running Alpine on the desktop.

Alpine 3.11 is released with Raspberry Pi 4 support, initial Gnome and KDE Plasma support and the addition of Vulkan, DXVK and the Rust programming language.

Alpine 3.12 is released with support for the D programming language.

Alpine and others just do it better, so LEAF sees its last stable release at 7.0.1

Alpine 3.13 is released and comes with official cloud images for services like AWS, cloud-init and better wifi support on the software side.

Alpine 3.14 is released with fail2ban taking a back seat to sshguard because it... failed... to ban... and ClamAV is now community supported.

Alpine 3.15 is released with kernel module compression using gzip, Gnome 41 and Plasma 5.23 land, and disk encryption is now supported right in the installer.

Alpine 3.16 is released as the last release of this history with better NVMe support, adding SSH keys at boot, a new admin user creation process and a new setup-desktop script for desktop environment installation.

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Alpine Linux Wikipedia page

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Next Time

We will discuss GNU Nano and the history. We also hope to have a couple of topics and some feedback.

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