Debian Installer etch beta 2
March 15th, 2006
The Debian Installer team is proud to announce the second beta release of the installer for Debian GNU/Linux Etch.
Improvements in this release of the installer include:
- base-config has been pensioned off: the installation is now done entirely before the reboot. Finally the entire Debian package installation process runs behind a user-friendly progress bar.
- This new version of the installer uses and installs the 2.6.15 kernel. As a consequence the installer now uses udev instead of discover for hardware detection for 2.6 based installs and supports the initramfs-tools and yaird initrd generators.
- Installations on S/390 are again supported.
- In addition to the architectures that had already made the switch, 2.6 is now the default kernel for alpha, ia64 and Netwinder/CATS (arm).
- The installer will set up /etc/apt/sources.list for the installed system using the codename (etch) rather than the suite (testing) of the release being installed.
- The installed system is set up to use UTF-8 encoding by default.
- For some architectures it is now possible to automatically partition a disk using logical volume management (LVM). Other architectures are expected to be added later.
- Automatically selects gpt disklabel instead of msdos disklabel for disks larger than 2 TB.
- Option to cancel some operations (e.g. DHCP configuration).
- Initial support for Broadcom BCM947XX and Linksys NSLU2 added.
- Improved rescue mode.
- Added the following languages: Icelandic and Kazakh.
This release no longer supports the following:
- Preseeding of base-config/early_command and base-config/late_command was removed with base-config. Existing preseed files using those values should be adapted to use preseed/late_command instead.
- This release has limited localization of the installed system as the package localization-config (which was responsible for part of that) has not yet been adapted so it can be run before the reboot.
- Installing Sarge is not supported; we expect to support this again in the next release.
- sparc32: No support for installations using a 2.6 kernel.
Our thanks to everybody who has contributed to this release. Special thanks go out to our friends from Ubuntu who laid the ground work for the first two improvements mentioned above.
The graphical installer is not part of this release although significant progress has been made in its development. We expect to integrate it into the next beta release of the installer. Images are available for testing from our website.
Installation CDs, other media, and everything else you'll need are available from our web site.