Debian Installer Jessie RC 1 release

January 26th, 2015

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

Important changes in this release of the installer

check-missing-firmware (in hw-detect) was updated to look at the kernel logs to determine which firmwares might be missing. This fixes the longstanding regression in this area compared to the Wheezy release (#725714).
Artwork was updated to use the new Lines theme by Juliette Belin.
Due to a change on the linux kernel side, the "---" separator is now used instead of the historical "--" one to separate kernel parameters from userland parameters. This makes it possible for user-params to do its job, and copy e.g. console="..." settings where they're expected in the installed system.
On the i386 architecture, the 486 kernel flavour was renamed to 586 since it was determined that 486 hadn't been supported in a long while.

Other changes in this release of the installer

brltty:
- Update autostart rules with newer devices.
- Fix auto-starting at-spi and orca in Xfce and LXDE.
choose-mirror: Update the mirror list (this includes dropping cdn.debian.net).
debootstrap: Add support for Debian stretch and Ubuntu vivid.
debian-installer: Update documentation of required minimum disk size.
efibootmgr: Better handle unreadable boot variables (#768880).
espeakup:
- Fix spelling keystrokes and char-by-char echo (#767595).
- Fix spelling capital keystrokes (#770753).
grub2: Add support for forcing an extra copy of grub-efi to the removable media path /boot/efi/EFI/BOOT/BOOT$ARCH.EFI (#767037, #773092, #773004).
grub-installer:
- Recognise the new ignore_uefi flag from partman-efi.
- Add extra support for forcing installation to the EFI removable media path (#767037).
- Add support for grub-installer/bootdev=default (#759737). To be used with caution!
libdebian-installer: Recognise the new ignore_uefi flag from partman-efi.
linux: Add ".0" to the kernel version string (#742226, #745984).
netcfg:
- Add support for /etc/network/interfaces.d/ (#770078).
- Fix missing bounds check on nameserver array iteration, leading to a crash when 4 (or more) nameservers are available (#768218).
partman-crypto: Add support for preseeding passphrases (#656710). To be used with caution!
partman-efi:
- Set the "esp" flag for the ESP System Partition (#768788).
- Warn the user if we've booted in UEFI mode but we seem to have only non-UEFI existing OS installations - give them the option to switch the installer to non-UEFI mode from this point forwards so they don't break potential dual-boot setup (#763127).
- Force umask for /boot/efi in mount options (#770033).
- Only display "Force UEFI installation" dialog for x86 (#773311).
partman-md: Fix mdadm.conf generation (#763073).
win32-loader:
- Disable "Download Debian GNU/kFreeBSD as stable" as this won't be possible in Jessie.
- Drop now-redundant desktop selection (#762478).
- Avoid dll dependency issues (#772898).

Hardware support changes

debian-installer:
- Add hd-media support for the armhf platform.
- Add scsi-modules to the cdrom flavour on ppc64el to be able to access the CD-ROM drive.
- Add grub.cfg to x86 netboot mini.iso for use on EFI systems (#762618).
- Add virtio-modules udebs to more arm images.
- Provide a PXE bootable grub.efi in the netboot flavour for amd64 and arm64.
linux:
- [armhf] Add udeb modules to support video and keyboard for imx6 (#770635).
- [i386] Rename 486 flavour to 586 for udebs (#768288).
- [armhf] add chipidea usb host driver to usb-modules for i.MX6.
- [armhf] Add mtd-modules udeb.
- [armhf] Add Exynos5 disk/usb/nic modules to udebs.
- [armhf] Backport BananaPi device tree files (#763897).
- udeb: Add pata_rdc to pata-modules (#633128).
partman-base: Improve detection of bootloader area, for Freescale and AM33XX systems (#770666).
u-boot:
- [armhf] Add Bananapi target.
- Enable A10-OLinuXino-Lime, A20-OLinuXino-LIME, Cubieboard2, and Cubieboard2_FEL targets (#762383).
- Disable efikamx and efikasb targets.
- Add nitrogen6q support to u-boot-imx.
- Add support for the Arndale board (#763186).
- Build FEL variants for all sunxi platforms.

Localization status

75 languages are supported in this release.
Full translation for 19 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.