Debian Installer Stretch Alpha 4 release

October 26th, 2015

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

Important changes in this release

Full CD sets were removed, as announced earlier in the Summary of the Debian CD BoF at DebConf15.
Almost all alternative options for CD#1 were removed, since the installer gives en easy choice of desktop selection during task selection, since Jessie. Only Xfce CD#1 remains as a single-CD desktop system.

Improvements in this release

at-spi2-atk:
- Enable accessibility by default in gtk2 applications.
at-spi2-core:
- Enable accessibility in Qt4 and Qt5 applications when the kde desktop is configured to start the screen reader.
debian-installer:
- Restore non-gtk speech synthesis entries, but only where they were useful and used.
- Bump linux kernel version from 4.1.0-2 to 4.2.0-1.
finish-install:
- Enable screen reader in KDE (#707196).
- Make sure /etc/mtab is a symlink to /proc/self/mounts (#802184, #802187).
netcfg:
- Fix is_layer3_qeth on s390x to avoid bailing out if the network driver is not qeth (#798376).
os-prober:
- Adjust extended dos partition support for recent versions of blkid/util-linux (#735169).
- Add support for Windows 10, otherwise reported as Windows Recovery Environment (#801278).
preseed:
- Rectify preseed_unspecified_at_boot test (#799361).
util-linux:
- Build static binaries for fdisk-udeb and util-linux-udeb (#798347).
zipl-installer:
- Use mapdevfs to find the device of the root filesystem.

Hardware support changes

flash-kernel:
- Add machine db entries for various sunxi-based systems which are (at least partially) supported in linux-image-4.2.0.
linux:
- [mips*el/loongson-3] udeb: Add fb-modules containing radeon driver (#776274).
- [mips*] Build ext4 as module. Add core-modules and ext4-modules udeb.
- [mips*/octeon] Enable CAVIUM_CN63XXP1 (#800595).
- [mips*/octeon] Enable MMC, MMC_BLOCK, OCTEON_MMC and other drivers as modules (#800594).
- ath10k: add qca6164 support (#800703).
u-boot:
- Updated udoo patches and debian/targets, upstream switched to a single target that supports both udoo quad and dual.
- u-boot-sunxi: Add Linksprite_pcDuino target (#799035).

Localization status

75 languages are supported in this release.
Full translation for 15 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.