Review: Alpine Linux 3.9.2

Alpine Linux is different in some important ways compared to most other distributions. It uses different libraries, it uses a different service manager (than most), it has different command line tools and a custom installer. All of this can, at first, make Alpine feel a bit unfamiliar, a bit alien. But what I found was that, after a little work had been done to get the system up and running (and after a few missteps on my part) I began to greatly appreciate the distribution. Alpine is unusually small and requires few resources. Even the larger Extended edition I was running required less than 100MB of RAM and less than a gigabyte of disk space after all my services were enabled. I also appreciated that Alpine ships with some security features, like PIE, and does not enable any services it does not need to run. I believe it is fair to say this distribution requires more work to set up. Installing Alpine is not a point-n-click experience, it's more manual and requires a bit of typing. Not as much as setting up Arch Linux, but still more work than average. Setting up services requires a little more work and, in some cases, reading too since Alpine works a little differently than mainstream Linux projects. I repeatedly found it was a good idea to refer to the project's wiki to learn which steps were different on Alpine. What I came away thinking at the end of my trial, and I probably sound old (or at least old fashioned), is Alpine Linux reminds me of what got me into running Linux in the first place, about 20 years ago. Alpine is fast, light, and transparent. It offered very few surprises and does almost nothing automatically. This results in a little more effort on our parts, but it means that Alpine does not do things unless we ask it to perform an action. It is lean, efficient and does not go around changing things or trying to guess what we want to do. These are characteristics I sometimes miss these days in the Linux ecosystem.

today's howtos

• How to change the keymap (keyboard layout) used by the GRUB shell in Gentoo Linux

• Bash Functions with Examples

• How to use the Linuxbrew package manager

• How to categorize Steam games on Linux with Steamycats

• Nginx Commands You Should Know

Linux v5.1-rc6

It's Easter Sunday here, but I don't let little things like random major religious holidays interrupt my kernel development workflow. The occasional scuba trip? Sure. But everybody sitting around eating traditional foods? No. You have to have priorities. There's only so much memma you can eat even if your wife had to make it from scratch because nobody eats that stuff in the US. Anyway, rc6 is actually larger than I would have liked, which made me go back and look at history, and for some reason that's not all that unusual. We recently had similar rc6 bumps in both 4.18 and 5.0. So I'm not going to worry about it. I think it's just random timing of pull requests, and almost certainly at least partly due to the networking pull request in here (with just over a third of the changes being networking-related, either in drivers or core networking). Also: Linux 5.1-rc6 Kernel Released In Linus Torvalds' Easter Day Message

Android Leftovers

• Moto G7 Review (All 3 Models): Which Moto G is Best?

• This week in Android: The Samsung Galaxy unFolding

• 5 Best Apps to Take Scrolling Screenshots on Android and iOS

• 26 best new Android games released this week including Whispers of a Machine, Agatha Knife, and Metal Slug Infinity

• Google Photos gaining Android Foldables support, backup status indicators

• How to Reset Any iPhone or Android Device

• Lost or stolen Android phone? Here's how to get it back

• Android developers can now enable rounded square icons in Google Play

• Android Update Impact on European Search Marketing

• Cinema APK – Catch Your Favorite Hollywood Movies & TV Series on Android Smartphone/Tablets!