Alpine Linux started out Gentoo style, but its self-hosting now. The network configuration is similar to Debian. If you've used a busybox based system before, its pretty good. The Alpine developers have contributed a number of enhancements to busybox to make the system run like any other.
But it is a busybox-based system. By default, there are no manpages; busybox applets don't have all the features of the real applications, etc. So you will run into situations where things don't run like they do on a "real" linux system. When you get to those situations, remember these two things:
* The base install is a good firewall/router - there's nothing there except the basics. You can probably get what you need using the tools that are there - although crudely. ( sh / awk / sed / grep can do everything Perl can do... Really.)
* Alpine has a complete set of packages. But you need to explicitly choose what you want to install.
Alpine Linux started as a fork of the LEAF project. The active project members of that team want to continue to make a Linux distribution that runs off a single floppy. And we think that's great. However, our needs required squid, DansGuardian, Samba, and a slew of other heavyweight applications - so we ended up with a set of packages that fit on a CD ROM.
The LEAF concept of "run from RAM" has a number of appealing features, especially on a firewall:
* If your configs are all on a floppy, an upgrade is as simple a burning a new CD and rebooting
* If your configs are all on a write-protected floppy, recovering from root-kits is as simple as rebooting.
On the other hand, there were some things we wanted to experiment with that weren't easy in the LEAF build environmnet at the time:
* Complete build-from source environment (e.g. gentoo-style build world)
* 2.6.x Kernel Support
* Stack-Smashing support from GCC
* PAX kernel security
* Better package manager, with dependencies, upgrade path, pre and post install scripts, etc.
Product's homepage
What's New in This Release: [ read full changelog ]
· kernel updated to 3.0.14
· kernel patch for issues with MTU and OpenNHRP
· opennhrp updated to 0.13 - better supports multi-ISP configurations with pingu
· shorewall fix for multi-ISP configurations with pingu - no more need to restart pingu everytime shorewall is restarted.
· unbound DNS resolver now updates the root server from a periodic script
Find us on Google+
