Alpine Linux 3.20 Released With Initial 64-bit RISC-V Support

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Alpine Linux 3.20 Released With Initial 64-bit RISC-V Support

Alpine Linux 3.20 has been released as the newest feature release to this security-minded, lightweight Linux distribution that is popular for embedded and container use. Alpine Linux continues to set itself apart from others by making use of musl libc, Busybox, and other modifications in the name of security and small footprint...

https://www.phoronix.com/news/Alpine-Linux-3.20

[cassiofb-dev]

Damn, this is awesome suprise!!!
I was waiting plasma 6 for November release but it was way faster than I thought!
Thanks everyone, I'm upgrading tonight 🙏

[Jabberwocky]

It looks like we will have decent software support before I can get my hands on a RISC-V system.

I wonder if I should start playing around with it via QEMU... e.g. to see how many Docker images I can build using it.

[Mirox]

Surprising Alpine has graphical interface. And Plasma 6 no less! I use Alpine as lightweight VM for quick network test. Mostly as base for docker container in development.

What is the use case of Alpine with a Desktop environment?

[fahrenheit]

Surprising Alpine has graphical interface. And Plasma 6 no less! I use Alpine as lightweight VM for quick network test. Mostly as base for docker container in development.

What is the use case of Alpine with a Desktop environment?

The same as any other desktop distro (specialy with edge). Though you will probably need to install some flatpaks depending on your usage (spotify, games and related drm).

[X_m7]

Surprising Alpine has graphical interface. And Plasma 6 no less! I use Alpine as lightweight VM for quick network test. Mostly as base for docker container in development.

What is the use case of Alpine with a Desktop environment?

From what I can tell Alpine's GUI support appears to be at least in part thanks to people working on postmarketOS, one of the postmarketOS devs noted that "the maintainers of GNOME and KDE upstream in Alpine are primarily pmOS contributors": https://gitlab.com/postmarketOS/pmap...ote_1821478824

And with Plasma 6 in particular apparently it was just one person who did the whole upgrade on Alpine and postmarketOS: https://postmarketos.org/blog/2024/0...ma-maintainers

[brucehoult]

I wonder if I should start playing around with it via QEMU... e.g. to see how many Docker images I can build using it.

If you have Docker Desktop installed (not just the engine) then on an x86 or arm machine you can just do ...

docker run -it riscv64/alpine sh

... as QEMU is built in to Docker.

6.58 MB image, so not a large pull :-)

[Jabberwocky]

If you have Docker Desktop installed (not just the engine) then on an x86 or arm machine you can just do ...

docker run -it riscv64/alpine sh

... as QEMU is built in to Docker.

6.58 MB image, so not a large pull :-)

That's neat.

I had horrible experiences with Docker Desktop and network configurations, so I'm staying away from it for now.

I'll probably have todo it the other way around with something like this: QEMU_ARCH=riscv64 with https://github.com/tianon/docker-qemu