The Adélie Linux Release Engineering Team is pleased to announce the release of Adélie Linux 1.0-ALPHA3 for the x86_64 and 32-bit PowerPC platforms. Learn more about Adélie Linux on our Web site.

This release is our first release based on the Alpine Linux build system, abuild. It features full Gtk+ 3 support and is built by the latest technology, binutils 2.29, GCC 6.4.0, and LLVM 4. This release brings improvements to the musl libc that allow X.Org to autoconfigure itself; it is no longer required to write an xorg.conf file to start X11. This release also removes all remaining vestiges of Portage and eselect. The current virtual system supported by APK is not yet feature-complete and there may be some issues surrounding it. Please file an issue if you run in to any problems with this alpha release.

The most important milestone for this release is that with abuild check integration, all packages that contain test suites have been fully tested, and all tests pass. This allows us to have a reasonable expectation of quality that sets us apart from most other Linux distributions.

x86 users will note that there is no ISO currently available for the 32-bit x86 platform. Unfortunately, there have been numerous issues creating even a simple bootstrap system for x86. For more information, or if you would like to help, please feel free to reach out to us on IRC, Twitter, or our new Mastodon / ActivityPub account.

64-bit PowerPC users will likewise note that there is no ISO available yet either. This is due to multiple ABI issues with the libffi package. 64-bit PowerPC users can temporarily run the 32-bit PowerPC software; it is fully compatible, though it may not allow you to use the entirety of your system’s memory.

Important notice for PowerPC users: Some models of iMac G4 have disk controllers that are not detected by cdinit, causing them to fail to boot to the installer. This will be fixed either in a later update of 1.0-alpha3, or in 1.0-alpha4 at the latest.

Please note: This is an early test release of Adélie Linux. While every care has been taken to ensure the stability of the system, features and packages may be missing, or not function correctly. You should always back up your computer’s data before you install a new Linux distribution. This release is being actively tested on multiple platforms. It is highly recommended that you use a dedicated computer or virtual machine to learn the environment until you are comfortable with using the Adélie Linux system and its package manager, apk.