Debian Installer 6.0 Beta1 release

October 30th, 2010

The Debian Installer team is pleased to announce the first beta release of the installer for Debian GNU/Linux Squeeze.

This release is dedicated to Frans Pop, who worked as Debian Installer Release Manager for several years. Even after he stepped out from this responsibility in 2007, Frans continued to be heavily involved in several aspects of D-I until he passed away.

Frans played a key role in ensuring that D-I was constantly maintained at the high quality level that had been set by its original developers. In particular, Frans kept the Installation Guide in very good shape throughout the period that he was involved in D-I.

Frans' name will remain associated with Debian Installer, and his loss is deeply regretted by Debian Installer developers, contributors and translators.

Improvements in this release of the installer

Behavioral changes in this release

Known issues in this release

See the errata for details and a full list of known issues.

Not yet known issues in this release

We do need your help to find bugs and further improve the installer, so please try it. Installer CDs, other media and everything you else you will need are available at our web site.

Win32-Loader

The i386 and amd64 CDs include a Windows executable (setup.exe - hence will get autorun'ed) which job is to get the user from a running Windows to a d-i environment, without breaking the Windows boot. This executable (in the Debian "win32-loader" package) installs the d-i initrd and a GRUB bootloader on the "boot disk" of Windows. After reboot, the install goes on from that image and uses the material on the CD for the install.

As this binary is not meant to be launched in a Debian environment (but within Windows), it has not necessarily been well tested: it would really benefit from being launched in all Windows versions for all languages!

Thanks

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