[GTALUG] Looking for Lighting Talks for January's meeting on Linux Distros!

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Mon, Dec 17, 2018 at 08:02:25PM -0500, Christopher Browne via talk wrote:
> I'd like to hear a bit about the "new kid on the block," Alpine Linux.
> 
> This is in heavy use by Docker folk; the general idea of it was to
> establish a small distribution without a lot of "cruft" that's suitable as
> a container OS.
> 
> They made some interesting choices:
> - Used to use uClibc as its libc, now uses musl, both being smaller and
> simpler than glibc
> - uses OpenRC as its init system
> - well, of course, they created their own package management system...
> - has some supposed hardening of the kernel
> - I find it interesting that a Linux kernel is around 3MB in size, but
> there are something like 130MB of kernel modules, which seems a bit
> ridiculous
> 
> Threat or offer ;-) is that I could prep a bit of material about Alpine,
> covering what I was interested in discovering; if someone has experience
> with it, that would be better than whatever I'd blather about ;-)

Well in the case of docker's use, there is no init system in most cases
where it is used.  It is certainly a lot smaller (often I see images
shrink by 80% when switching to alpine).  Docker of course doesn't use
the alpine kernel build either, just the packages for the applications.

-- 
Len Sorensen