Debian Installer Jessie Alpha 1 release

March 19th, 2014

The Debian Installer team is pleased to announce the first alpha release of the installer for Debian 8 Jessie.

Improvements in this release of the installer

Many components were updated during the beginning of the Jessie release cycle, so a full list of changes is not be included in this announcement.
apt-setup: Avoid hang due to interactive apt-cdrom (#740673).
grub-installer: Support menu selection of GRUB boot disk (#706112).

Behavorial changes in this release

Xfce is the default desktop environment for the time being. Quoting tasksel's changelog: this will be re-evaluated in August 2014, and may change again before Jessie is released.
It's still possible to select an alternative desktop to install at the boot prompt; installation images are available for the various major desktop environments as usual.

Hardware support changes

The ia64 architecture has been removed from the archive, and is no longer supported.
The s390 architecture has been replaced with the s390x architecture.
It wasn't possible to build the installer for sparc (#731806), so no installation images are available for this architecture. Its future as an official port is being evaluated by the release team.
The Linux kernel has been updated from 3.2 to 3.13.
The FreeBSD kernel has been updated from 9.0 to 9.2.
armel: The iop32x flavour has been dropped.
armhf: The armmp flavour has been added; it covers both mx5 and vexpress.
mipsel: The cobalt flavour has been dropped.
s390x: The tape flavour has been dropped.

Localization status

75 languages are supported in this release.
Full translation for 12 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.