Debian Installer Buster Alpha 5 release

February 2nd, 2019

The Debian Installer team is pleased to announce the fifth alpha release of the installer for Debian 10 Buster.

Important change in this release

The Debian Installer team is happy to report that the Buster Alpha 5 release of the installer includes some initial support for UEFI Secure Boot (SB) in Debian's installation media.

This support is not yet complete, and we would like to request some help! A detailed article with more background about Secure Boot and with a pointer to instructions on how to test and report findings has been published separately.

Improvements in this release

btrfs-progs:
- Add support for libzstd.
cdebconf:
- Notify gtk-font-set of the zoom factor.
debian-installer:
- Bump Linux kernel ABI from 4.18.0-3 to 4.19.0-1.
debootstrap:
- Add runtime optimizations (#871835).
fonts-noto:
- Fix Gujarati support by including Noto Serif Gujarati in main udeb package (#911705, #915825).
grub-installer:
- Add support for shim-signed and grub-efi-amd64-signed, default to installing signed packages on amd64.
grub2:
- Add luks modules to signed UEFI images (#908162).
- Backport Xen PVH guest support from upstream (#776450).
- Improve arm/arm64 initrd handling (#907596, #909420, #915091).
- Don't enforce Shim signature validation if Secure Boot is disabled.
localechooser:
- Add missing English string "Choose language" to some translations: Bosnian, Hungarian, Tajik.
partconf:
- Remove reiserfs support (#717534).
partman-lvm:
- Fix invalid characters in volume group names (#911036).
partman-md:
- When creating a new RAID1/5/6/10 array, start syncing at the minimum speed allowed by the system, instead of letting it run at full speed, slowing down package installation (#838503).
rootskel-gtk:
- Use Noto Serif Gujarati font for Gujarati (#911705, #915825).
- Apply font zoom set by cdebconf shortcut.
win32-loader:
- Embed debian-archive-removed-keys keyring to ensure signature verification is performed successfully.
wpa:
- Re-enable TLSv1.0 and security level 1 for wpasupplicant (#907518, #911297).

Hardware support changes

debian-installer:
- [arm64] Use arm-trusted-firmware instead of atf-allwinner to build pine64_plus and pinebook images.
- [armhf] Re-enable Firefly-RK3288 image.
- [armhf] Update Build-Depends for u-boot-rockchip.
flash-kernel:
- Add machine db entry for Odroid HC1 (#916980).
- Add machine db entry for Seagate Blackarmor NAS220 (#918193).
linux:
- udeb: Define mtd-core-modules package to contain MTD core if not built-in.
- udeb: Move MTD core from nic-modules to mtd-core-modules.
partman-partitioning:
- Set the default disklabel type for RISC-V-based systems to gpt.

Localization status

76 languages are supported in this release.
Full translation for 31 of them.

Known issues in this release

See the errata 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. Installer CDs, other media and everything else you will need are available at our web site.

Thanks

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