Debian Installer Bullseye RC 2 release

June 14th, 2021

The Debian Installer team is pleased to announce the second release candidate of the installer for Debian 11 Bullseye.

Improvements in this release

cdebconf:
- Intercept the size-request event and adjust the requested width to a minimum of 300 pixels. This seems sufficient to avoid the infinite loop in GTK (#988786). This fixes a number of scenarios including:
  - Hang before offering a shell in rescue mode (#987377).
  - Hang immediately with Sinhala and other languages (#987449).
  - Hang in various places with Swedish (mirror selection or package manager configuration).
- Capture new-style GLib structured logging messages (#988589).
- Align the display of info messages (e.g. “Rescue mode”) to the right again, since Debian (logo and name) is back on the left side with the Homeworld theme.
- Make sure info messages (e.g. “Rescue mode”) get displayed on the banner on the start-up screen (#882804).
choose-mirror:
- Update Mirrors.masterlist.
debian-cd:
- Add brltty and espeakup to all images from netinst up, for users installing without a network mirror (#678065).
debian-installer:
- Bump Linux kernel ABI to 5.10.0-7.
grub-installer:
- Make sure reinstalling GRUB on BIOS systems doesn't report an error when everything went fine (#988826).
gtk+2.0:
- Avoid a relayout loop that's likely to happen in the graphical installer (#988786).
lowmem:
- Allow forcing a lowmem level (e.g. lowmem=+0).
- Update lowmem levels for arm64, armhf, mipsel, mips64el, and ppc64el.
open-iscsi:
- Ship the contents of the library package inside the udeb, instead of having the udeb depend on the library package (#987568).
partman-base:
- Fix and extend support for /dev/wd* devices with rumpdisk.
systemd:
- udev-udeb: setup /dev/fd, /dev/std{in,out,err} symlinks (#975018).

Hardware support changes

linux:
- [arm64] udeb: Include mdio module for RPi4 Ethernet (#985956).
- [s390x] udeb: Include standard scsi-modules containing the virtio_blk module (#988005).

Localization status

78 languages are supported in this release.
Full translation for 33 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.