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
- Auto-selection of kernel for PlayStation 3.
- Recovery partitions for Microsoft Windows are properly detected.
- Linux kernel updated to 2.6.32.
- GNU Parted updated to 2.2.
- Support for new platforms has been added:
- Marvell GuruPlug;
- Marvell OpenRD-Ultimate;
- HP t5325 Thin Client (partial support).
- Support for isohybrid images when using cdrom-detect/try-usb.
- Installer now look for firmware .debs on the installation media, in a firmware/ directory, allowing PXE images and CDs to be created with firmware .debs included.
- Hardware specific Debian packages are installed automatically using discover-pkginstall from the discover package.
- Localization:
- added Kannada, Persian and Telugu languages (Asturian and Kazakh were added in alpha1, and Estonian was reactivated in alpha1);
- added Thai in the console-based installer;
- drop support for Wolof and Welsh, because of the lack of updates for these languages since the release of lenny;
- the final count of supported languages for this release is 67 (including English).
Behavioral changes in this release
- Installer now uses udhcpc as DHCP client, except on kFreeBSD images.
- Support for the ReiserFS file system is no longer included by default. To use ReiserFS for a new system, select
partman-reiserfsin the selection dialog for optional installer components (at medium or low priority) or boot the installer with 'modules?=partman-reiserfs'. - No longer creates the /cdrom compatibility symlink to /media/cdrom. /cdrom was deprecated in Etch.
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!