Debian Installer Stretch Alpha 1 release

July 21st, 2015

The Debian Installer team is pleased to announce the first alpha release of the installer for Debian 9 Stretch.

Important changes in this release of the installer

The default is now the graphical mode (where available) instead of the text mode (#485586). The latter is still fully supported.
The default architecture with multi-arch image is now amd64 instead of i386.
The installer and the installed systems will now use ifnames by default instead of mac for network interface names (more details in the following mail: Proposal v2: enable stateless persistant network interface names).
There was a consequent version bump for the Linux kernel: from the 3.16 series to the 4.0 one.

Other improvements in this release

cdebconf-text-udeb:
- Add support for text shortcuts (#781439).
cdrom-detect:
- Add a check and warning for UNetbootin-created media (#744865).
console-setup:
- Improve support for Nokia N900 (nokiarx51) (#789816).
hwdetect:
- No longer install acpi acpid acpi-support-base (#783247).
localechooser:
- Fix preseeded language code check.
partman-md:
- Add support for preseeding RAID10 (#790941).
tasksel:
- Make GNOME and Xfce desktop tasks co-installable (#783571).
- Adjust dictionaries for some languages (#767779, #767773).

Hardware support changes

debian-installer:
- Add DTB for various boards:
  - SheevaPlug, SheevaPlug eSATA and GuruPlug (#785588).
  - OpenRD Base, Client and Ultimate.
  - LaCie NAS devices.
  - QNAP NAS devices (with CPU variant detection).
- Add support for Seagate Dockstar.
- Drop support for D-Link DNS-323 / Conceptronic CH3SNAS due to size limitations.
- Adjust u-boot related configurations (#786369):
  - MX6_Cubox-i supports hummingboard-i1 and hummingboard-i2ex.
  - Wandboard now supports all variants (Solo, Dual-Lite, and Quad).
libdebian-installer:
- Add device tree variants for supported armel/kirkwood devices (#787563).
linux:
- Add more drivers to sound-modules (#782495).
- [armhf] Add stmmac-platform module to nic-modules (#786716).
- [arm64] Enable PCI support and related modules.
- [armhf] Add ehci-orion module to usb-modules (#783324).
- Add xhci-pci and xhci-plat-hcd to usb-modules (#770912).
oldsys-preseed:
- Recognize device tree variants of QNAP NAS devices.

Localization status

75 languages are supported in this release.
Full translation for 7 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.