The second release candidate for the Debian GNU/Linux 11 (Bullseye) installer is now available for testing. The tentative release date for the final version of Debian 11 Bullseye is currently 31 July 2021.

Debian Installer Bullseye RC 2 release

This new release of Debian again comes with a lot more software than its predecessor buster; the distribution includes over 13370 new packages, for a total of over 57703 packages. Most of the software in the distribution has been updated: over 35532 software packages (this is 62% of all packages in buster). Also, a significant number of packages (over 7278, 13% of the packages in buster) have for various reasons been removed from the distribution.

The following are the officially supported architectures for Debian 11:

• 32-bit PC (i386) and 64-bit PC (amd64)
• 64-bit ARM (arm64)
• ARM EABI (armel)
• ARMv7 (EABI hard-float ABI, armhf)
• little-endian MIPS (mipsel)
• 64-bit little-endian MIPS (mips64el)
• 64-bit little-endian PowerPC (ppc64el)
• IBM System z (s390x)

The Debian Installer team[1] is pleased to announce the second
release candidate of the installer for Debian 11 "Bullseye".

I'd like to personally thank Simon McVittie for going above and beyond
the call of duty, providing us with an incredible amount of support on
the cdebconf vs. GTK front!

Improvements in this release
============================

* cdebconf:
- Intercept the size-request event and adjust the requested width
to a minimum of 300 pixels. This seems sufficient to avoid the
infinite loop in GTK (#988786). This fixes a number of scenarios
including:
+ Hang before offering a shell in rescue mode (#987377).
+ Hang immediately with Sinhala and other languages (#987449).
+ Hang in various places with Swedish (mirror selection or
package manager configuration).
- Capture new-style GLib structured logging messages (#988589).
- Align the display of info messages (e.g. “Rescue mode”) to the
right again, since Debian (logo and name) is back on the left
side with the Homeworld theme.
- Make sure info messages (e.g. “Rescue mode”) get displayed on
the banner on the start-up screen (#882804).
* choose-mirror:
- Update Mirrors.masterlist.
* debian-cd:
- Add brltty and espeakup to all images from netinst up, for users
installing without a network mirror (#678065).
* debian-installer:
- Bump Linux kernel ABI to 5.10.0-7.
* grub-installer:
- Make sure reinstalling GRUB on BIOS systems doesn't report an
error when everything went fine (#988826).
* gtk+2.0:
- Avoid a relayout loop that's likely to happen in the graphical
installer (#988786).
* lowmem:
- Allow forcing a lowmem level (e.g. lowmem=+0).
- Update lowmem levels for arm64, armhf, mipsel, mips64el, and
ppc64el.
* open-iscsi:
- Ship the contents of the library package inside the udeb,
instead of having the udeb depend on the library package
(#987568).
* partman-base:
- Fix and extend support for /dev/wd* devices with rumpdisk.
* systemd:
- udev-udeb: setup /dev/fd, /dev/std{in,out,err} symlinks
(#975018).

Hardware support changes
========================

* linux:
- [arm64] udeb: Include mdio module for RPi4 Ethernet (#985956).
- [s390x] udeb: Include standard scsi-modules containing the
virtio_blk module (#988005).

Localization status
===================

* 78 languages are supported in this release.
* Full translation for 33 of them.

Known bugs in this release
==========================

* The firmware for graphic cards situation already mentioned in the
RC 1 announce is now tracked via an umbrella bug report (#989863).

See the errata[2] 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. Installation images, and everything else you will need
are available at our web site[3].

Thanks
======

The Debian Installer team thanks everybody who has contributed to this
release.

1.   https://wiki.debian.org/DebianInstaller/Team 
2.   https://www.debian.org/devel/debian-installer/errata
3.   https://www.debian.org/devel/debian-installer 

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Debian 11 Installer RC2
Debian 11 Release Notes