Debian Installer Bullseye Alpha 3 release
The Debian Installer team[1] is pleased to announce the third alpha release of the installer for Debian 11 "Bullseye".
Improvements in this release
============================
* apt-setup:
- Remove mention of volatile repo from generated sources.list file
(#954460).
* base-installer:
- Improve test architecture, adding support for Linux 5.x versions.
* brltty:
- Improve hardware detection and driver support.
* cdebconf:
- Make text interface report progress more accurately: from the
very beginning, and also as soon as an answer to a question has
been given.
* choose-mirror:
- Update Mirrors.masterlist.
* console-setup:
- Improve support for box-drawing characters (#965029).
- Sync Terminus font with the xfonts-terminus package.
- Fix Lithuanian layout (#951387).
* debian-cd:
- Only include Linux udebs for the latest ABI, making small
installation images more useful.
* debian-installer:
- Bump Linux kernel ABI to 5.9.0-4
- Drop fontconfig tweaks introduced in the Debian Installer Buster
Alpha 1 release (See: #873462).
- Install kmod-udeb instead of libkmod2-udeb.
- Mimick libgcc1 handling, for libgcc-s1.
- Clean up the list of fake packages.
- Replace the mklibs library reduction pass with a hack, copying
libgcc_s.so.[124] from the host filesystem for the time being.
- Add explicit build-depends on fdisk on arm64, amd64 and i386 now
that util-linux doesn't depend on it anymore.
- Add grub2 to built-using (#968998).
- Fix FTBFS with fakeroot by adjusting the /dev/console check (see
#940056).
* debian-installer-utils:
- Adjust fetch-url's use of file descriptors for recent udev
versions (#967546).
* debootstrap:
- Only install apt-transport-https on stretch and earlier, HTTPS
support was merged into the core apt package for buster
(#920255, #879755).
* finish-install:
- Drop upstart support entirely (#923845).
* fonts-noto:
- Fix Sinhala support in the installer (#954948).
* grub-installer:
- Update templates, to make them fit for UEFI systems and new kind
of system storage media (#954718).
* kmod:
- Split kmod-udeb off of libkmod2-udeb and actually ship the
libraries in libkmod2-udeb (#953952).
* locale-chooser:
- Activate new languages: Kabyle, Occitan.
* partman-auto:
- Bump /boot sizes in most recipes from between 128 and 256M to
between 512 and 768M (#893886, #951709).
- Import partman-auto/cap-ram support from Ubuntu, to allow
capping RAM size as used for swap partition calculations
(#949651, #950344). This allows us to cap the minimum size of
swap partitions size to 1*CAP, and their maximum size to a
maximum of 2 or 3*CAP depending on architecture. Default is set
to 1024, thus capping swap partitions to between 1 and 3GB.
* partman-efi:
- Remount /cdrom read-write if it also happens to be used as
/boot/efi (#967918).
- Remove usage of the efivars module, and stop looking for
/proc/efi. efivarfs is the current interface, and /proc/efi went
away a long time ago.
* partman-partitioning:
- Include ntfs-3g-udeb on arm64.
* partman-target:
- Add a hint to the new fstab about using `systemctl daemon-reload`
after changing /etc/fstab (#963573).
* systemd:
- Install 60-block.rules in udev-udeb (#958397). The block device
rules were split out from 60-persistent-storage.rules in v220.
This fixes a longstanding bug where UUIDs would not be used for
filesystems on initial installation.
* util-linux:
- Take over eject-udeb (#737658).
* win32-loader:
- Introduce UEFI boot manager and Secure Boot support (#918863).
Hardware support changes
========================
* debian-cd:
- Enable graphical installer for arm64.
- Exclude lilo-installer and elilo-installer udebs for all archs.
- Stop making XFCE single CD images.
- Stop making DVD ISO images 2 and 3 for amd64/i386 (they are
still available via jigdo).
* debian-installer:
- Update Firefly-RK3288 image for new u-boot version.
- [arm64] Add support for firefly-rk3399, pinebook-pro-rk3399,
rockpro64-rk3399, rock64-rk3328 and rock-pi-4-rk3399 to u-boot
images and netboot SD card images.
- [arm64] Make all netboot sdcard images start at offset 32768,
for compatibility with rockchip platforms.
- Add OLPC XO-1.75 laptop support (#949306).
- Enable GTK build for arm64.
- Add support for NanoPi NEO Air (#928863).
- Add wireless-regdb-udeb to Linux builds that include
nic-wireless-modules.
- efi-image: Improve sizing calculation to reduce wasted space.
- efi-image: Include DTB files in the ESP for armhf and arm64
systems. This should make U-Boot based systems work better when
booting via UEFI.
* flash-kernel:
- Add FriendlyARM NanoPi NEO Plus2 (#955374).
- Add Pinebook (#930098).
- Add Pinebook Pro.
- Add Olimex A64-Olinuxino and A64-Olinuxino-eMMC (#931195).
- Add SolidRun LX2160A Honeycomb and Clearfog CX (#958023).
- Add SolidRun Cubox-i Solo/DualLite variants (#939261).
- Add Turris MOX (#961303).
* linux:
- Move any compression modules to kernel-image udeb; drop
compress-modules udeb.
- Make input-modules udeb depend on crc-modules.
- [arm64] Add i2c_mv64xxx to i2c-modules udeb.
- [arm64] Add drivers/pinctrl to kernel-image udeb.
- [arm64] Add analogix-anx6345, pwm-sun4i, sun4i-drm and
sun8i-mixer to fb-modules udeb.
- [arm64] Add pwm-sun4i to fb-modules udeb.
- [arm64] Add armada_37xx_wdt to kernel-image udeb (#961086).
- [mips*] Drop hfs-modules udeb.
- [x86] Add crc32_pclmul to crc-modules udeb.
- Add crc32_generic to crc-modules udeb.
- Reverse order of cdrom-core and isofs/udf udebs: the latter ones
now require the former.
- Drop zlib-modules udeb (zlib_deflate is now always built-in).
- Add f2fs-modules udeb.
Localization status
===================
* 78 languages are supported in this release.
* New languages: Kabyle, Occitan.
* Full translation for 16 of them.
Known bugs in this release
==========================
* There seems to be no known major bug as of yet.
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
Cyril Brulebois has announced the third alpha version of the Debian Installer for Debian GNU/Linux 11 Bullseye.
