Debian Developers' Corner / Debian-Installer / Latest News for Debian-Installer / Debian-Installer News from 2008 / News -- Debian Installer lenny beta 2

Debian Installer lenny beta 2

June 9th, 2008

The Debian Installer team is proud to announce the second beta release of the installer for Debian GNU/Linux Lenny.

Improvements in this release of the installer

• This new version of the installer uses and installs the 2.6.24 kernel.
• Support for the armel (arm little endian) architecture, using the new Embedded ABI. Note that none of the currently supported systems support installing from CD images.
• Installer images for i386 and amd64 have a new boot menu using syslinux's vesamenu. This allows for a more user-friendly selection of for example the regular or graphical installer. For the multi-architecture CD/DVD images this change means the 64-bits version of the installer needs to be selected manually from the menu. See the Installation Guide for details on how to use the new menu.
• The graphical installer now has full support for encrypted partitioning.
• Support for column alignment in cdebconf resulting in improved language selection in the graphical installer. This will be extended to other installer components (notably the partitioner) in future releases.
• Many improvements in the component for language, country and locale selection. The most visible are that it's now possible to back up between dialogs within the component and that the overly long full country list has been split into separate dialogs for continent and country.
• The installer will warn users when the translation of the installer to their language is incomplete and displays which language(s) the installer will fall back to.
• Improved support for mouse configuration for the graphical installer makes use of a serial mouse possible.
• The relatime file system mount option is now usable.
• Issues during installs from CD/DVD due to the addition of support for multiple CDs have been resolved.
• When using the KDE or Xfce CD images it is now possible to select additional tasks, similar to the normal CD set (which by default installs GNOME).
• The following additional languages are now supported: Marathi (only in the graphical installer).

Known issues in this release

• As a result of a recent switch to Perl 5.10, the installation logs will show some Perl warnings. As far as we know these are harmless and can be ignored.
• Installations in Russian (and possibly some other languages) may fail due to an error from aptitude; most languages seem unaffected.
• i386: for this release installation from floppy disk is not supported.
• i386/amd64:GRUB installation on cpqarray RAID volumes (/dev/ida/cXdX) may fail.
• arm: this release does not support Netwinder systems.
• There are still a few issues for some PowerPC subarchitectures.
• Known issues for the graphical installer:
  • some non-US keymaps are not fully supported (deadkeys and combining characters do not work);
  • keys for accented or special characters may not work correctly; this is a regression compared to previous releases which will hopefully be fixed again soon;
  • touchpads should work, but support may not be optimal; if you experience problems, you should use an external mouse instead;
  • should work on almost all PowerPC systems that have an ATI graphics card, but is unlikely to work on other PowerPC systems.

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

Our thanks to everybody who has contributed to this release.

Installation CDs and DVDs, other media, errata, and everything else you'll need are available from our web site.