Release Candidate 1 of the new Debian installer has been released

The Debian-Installer team announces the first release candidate of the Debian sarge installer. Significant improvements in this release of the installer include:

- Support for the s390 architecture, completing the full set of 11 released Debian architectures.

- Added support for more subarches for arm (riscpc, riscstation), m68k (bvme6000, mvme147, mvme16x), mipsel (cobalt) and powerpc (oldworld).

- Native port to the amd64 architecture. Note that amd64 packages are not yet available in the Debian archive; packages and images are available from the Debian amd64 project.

- CD images finally work for sparc64.

- Full size CD images are available as part of the release for the first time. Note that this is not an official release of Debian sarge, just a Debian-Installer beta release.

- Supports installing using the 2.6 kernel on powerpc.

- Installing with the 2.6 kernel on i386 is no longer considered experimental as it was in previous betas, but is still not the default.

- Support for firewire CD drives and firewire ethernet.

- Added and improved support for a wide variety of other hardware.

- Improved documentation.

- Numerous bug fixes and improvements -- far too many to list here.

- Translated into 40 languages (36 fully complete), including new translations to Croatian and Farsi.

- The latest and greatest versions of everything from Debian's testing distribution, which is close to official release itself.

We're confident that this is our best release ever, so give it a try, install Debian today, and don't forget to file an installation report so we can continue to make the installer even better.

Links to bootable images and documentation are on our web site.

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