Debian Installer Buster Alpha 1 release
September 3rd, 2017
The Debian Installer team is pleased to
announce the first alpha release of the installer for Debian 10
Buster
.
Important notes for this release of the installer
- On the graphical installer side, a workaround has been applied to retain the historical rendering, since the default rendering changed heavily in recent fontconfig and freetype releases. It isn't bit for bit identical to what we had in Stretch, but it looks very close. Later, we'll need to figure out how to compare both renderings (improvements, regressions, different issues, etc.) for as many languages as possible. This is going to be tracked in #873462.
- Since mips64el has been suffering from toolchain issues for several weeks (#871514), it was decided not to publish any images for this architecture.
Improvements in this release
- debian-installer:
- Build against buster.
- Stop build-depending on *-pic libraries, due to the switch to mklibs-copy.
- Bump Linux kernel ABI from 4.9.0-3 to 4.12.0-1.
- network-console:
- Create an sshd user to cope with privilege separation, which became mandatory in recent OpenSSH releases.
- os-prober:
- Fix EFI check for ID_PART_ENTRY_SCHEME: look for "dos" instead of "msdos" (#817023).
- partman-auto-lvm:
- Fix check by using -e instead of stat (#759553).
- partman-auto-raid:
- Allow using a logical volume as /boot when partman-auto-lvm/no_boot=true (See: #610377).
- partman-base:
- For systems that are known to have their boot firmware on an mmcblk device, protect the firmware area on all mmcblk devices (and not only on mmcblk0) from being clobbered during guided partitioning (#854822).
- partman-partitioning:
- Make get_real_device() both simpler and more generic by mimicking the linux kernel's disk_name function (See: #820818).
- rescue:
- Invoke search-path by absolute path in chroot_has (#867564).
- rootskel:
- Create /run on non-linux too, for screen support.
- rootskel-gtk:
- Increase font size of mr_IN locale (#863952).
- systemd:
- Fix missing 60-input-id.rules in udev-udeb, which breaks the graphical version of the Debian Installer, as no key presses or mouse events get processed (#872598).
- user-setup:
- Cope with a different disabled root password ("!*") in /etc/shadow as well as the normal unset one ("*"), fixing a major bug in the live installer (#866206).
- win32-loader:
- Replace all mirror URLs with deb.debian.org
Hardware support changes
- debian-installer:
- Drop orion5x-qnap images.
- flash-kernel:
- Add a machine db entry for the Raspberry Pi 3 Model B (#869488).
- Add a machine db entry for the Firefly-RK3399.
- Add a machine db entry for the Radxa Rock 2 Square (#868166).
- Add machine db entries for various sunxi-based systems that are (at least partially) supported in kernel 4.12 and u-boot v2017.07-rc3: Banana Pi BPI-M2-Plus, FriendlyArm NanoPi M1, FriendlyARM NanoPi NEO Air, Lichee Pi Zero, NextThing C.H.I.P. Pro, Xunlong Orange Pi Zero.
- Add a machine db entry for the BeagleBone Green (#866822).
- grub-installer:
- Really add support for JBOD systems with a large number of discs (#839894).
- libdebian-installer:
- mips: Add support for checking the "isa" field, and use it as fallback for unknown CPUs (#865425).
- mips: Drop unsupported subarchitectures.
- linux:
Localization status
- 75 languages are supported in this release.
- Full translation for 25 of them.
Known issues in this release
See the errata for details and a full list of known issues.
Feedback for this release
We need your help to find bugs and further improve the installer, so please try it. Installer CDs, other media and everything else you will need are available at our web site.
Thanks
The Debian Installer team thanks everybody who has contributed to this release.