What's the difference between Virtual, Standard, and Extended versions of Alpine?
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- Offline
- 2 months 3 weeks ago
- 2016-04-30
Someone asked the same question a while back and was told to hover over the links for each ISO to see more info. However, the mouseover popups provide very little information.
If you hover over Virtual, it says "Same as Standard, but with a kernel optimized for virtual machines."
What does this mean exactly? How is it optimized?
(It's impressively small at only 36 MB, vs. 93 MB for Standard. I'm amazed by the size, but it also highlights that it seems very different from Standard if it's less than half the size.)
Hovering over Extended says that it's "suitable for routers and servers that run from RAM", which is confusing because it's the largest ISO at 359 MB. I want to use Alpine to run more-or-less standard web servers on VPSes like Vultr, probably running nginx or a golang web framework. Is there something about Extended that makes it a lighter runtime environment than Standard (even though it's much larger on disk)?
I can't comment on the optimizations for the virtual ISO, but the extended ISO is effectively the same as the standard ISO but with many more (~200 more) packages which can make it more useful for offline installations or when on a slow network.
I'm also keen to know the details. The only thing I can really find is this line in the release notes of Alpine 3.4:
I'm going to assume that a whole lot of drivers and firmware not required for virtual machines have been removed.
Yeah it's frustrating that such basic questions don't get answered here. There's nothing more basic than "what's in it?", and I'm puzzled why this project is so undocumented and unresponsive to questions. I can't deploy Alpine given the lack of info and lack of responses. Others have posted about the lack of answers to questions asked in this forum, and it looks like it's not going to improve. It's a shame - I like the idea of Alpine, but I can't use it. It's too much of a risk given the lack of info and responses.
> It's too much of a risk given the lack of info and responses.
It is not the RISK.
I think it is just an OPPORTUNITY to improve this project. Welcome )))
From my side, Alpine's idea is perfect. A small lack of documentation is just a sick of grows-up.
Alpine is not a distro for newbies unfortunately... but if you understand Alpine's idea and its difference from other distros, then you are already not a newbie and you don't need a lot of docs. You don't ever need "man" command in your system...