Debian Installer Bullseye Alpha 2 release

March 16th, 2020

The Debian Installer team is pleased to announce the second alpha release of the installer for Debian 11 Bullseye.

Improvements in this release

anna:
- Turn warning regarding missing kernel modules into a more descriptive error (#749991, #367515).
clock-setup:
- Rephrase template about the benefit of a correctly set up clock.
espeakup:
- Do not use sleep with subsecond durations.
- Print the number of detected cards.
debian-installer:
- Make write-built-using more robust.
- Bump Linux kernel ABI to 5.4.0-4.
glibc:
- Make libc-udeb depends on libcrypt1-udeb (#941853).
grub-installer:
- Change template, to clarify definition of the just installed Debian system.
netcfg:
- Improve templates (especially regarding malformed IP addresses).
pkgsel:
- Ensure tasksel is installed, regardless of its priority.
- Add preseedable pkgsel/run_tasksel debconf template, making it possible (by setting it to false) to skip tasksel entirely (installation and prompt), while still benefiting from other pkgsel features.
preseed:
- Update auto-install/defaultroot, replacing buster with bullseye.
rootskel:
- Re-order script to make sure users are set up.
- Enable high-contrast theme when installation was made with the dark theme.
- Enable compiz ezoom features for accessibility.
- Specify fs_spec field in fstab-linux mount points. Some tools parse /proc/mounts and try to match on the spec field to find where sysfs is mounted (ie. dasdfmt on s390x). This makes the installer environment look more similar to installed systems.
- Tweak how multiple consoles are used. If preseeding is detected, do not run on multiple consoles in parallel as that causes race conditions and weird behaviour. Instead, just run on the "preferred" console (#940028, #932416).
systemd:
- Use 73-usb-net-by-mac.link in udev-udeb (See also: #946196).
user-setup:
- Add input, kvm, and render to reserved-usernames; udev.postinst adds these as system groups.

Hardware support changes

debian-installer:
- Switch from vmlinux to vmlinuz for mips* except on Octeon.
- Update Firefly-RK3288 image for new u-boot version.
flash-kernel:
- Add support for bootspec entries, bootable by barebox (#931953).
- Fix a corner case that makes flash-kernel fail silently (#932231).
- Make initrd optional for machines with Boot-Multi-Path (#869073).
- Add support for Librem 5 devkit (#927700).
- Add support for OLPC XO-1.75 laptops.

Localization status

76 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.