Debian Installer Bullseye Alpha 3 release

December 6th, 2020

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

Improvements in this release

apt-setup:
- Remove mention of volatile repo from generated sources.list file (#954460).
base-installer:
- Improve test architecture, adding support for Linux 5.x versions.
brltty:
- Improve hardware detection and driver support.
cdebconf:
- Make text interface report progress more accurately: from the very beginning, and also as soon as an answer to a question has been given.
choose-mirror:
- Update Mirrors.masterlist.
console-setup:
- Improve support for box-drawing characters (#965029).
- Sync Terminus font with the xfonts-terminus package.
- Fix Lithuanian layout (#951387).
debian-cd:
- Only include Linux udebs for the latest ABI, making small installation images more useful.
debian-installer:
- Bump Linux kernel ABI to 5.9.0-4
- Drop fontconfig tweaks introduced in the Debian Installer Buster Alpha 1 release (See: #873462).
- Install kmod-udeb instead of libkmod2-udeb.
- Mimick libgcc1 handling, for libgcc-s1.
- Clean up the list of fake packages.
- Replace the mklibs library reduction pass with a hack, copying libgcc_s.so.[124] from the host filesystem for the time being.
- Add explicit build-depends on fdisk on arm64, amd64 and i386 now that util-linux doesn't depend on it anymore.
- Add grub2 to built-using (#968998).
- Fix FTBFS with fakeroot by adjusting the /dev/console check (see #940056).
debian-installer-utils:
- Adjust fetch-url's use of file descriptors for recent udev versions (#967546).
debootstrap:
- Only install apt-transport-https on stretch and earlier, HTTPS support was merged into the core apt package for buster (#920255, #879755).
finish-install:
- Drop upstart support entirely (#923845).
fonts-noto:
- Fix Sinhala support in the installer (#954948).
grub-installer:
- Update templates, to make them fit for UEFI systems and new kind of system storage media (#954718).
kmod:
- Split kmod-udeb off of libkmod2-udeb and actually ship the libraries in libkmod2-udeb (#953952).
locale-chooser:
- Activate new languages: Kabyle, Occitan.
partman-auto:
- Bump /boot sizes in most recipes from between 128 and 256M to between 512 and 768M (#893886, #951709).
- Import partman-auto/cap-ram support from Ubuntu, to allow capping RAM size as used for swap partition calculations (#949651, #950344). This allows us to cap the minimum size of swap partitions size to 1*CAP, and their maximum size to a maximum of 2 or 3*CAP depending on architecture. Default is set to 1024, thus capping swap partitions to between 1 and 3GB.
partman-efi:
- Remount /cdrom read-write if it also happens to be used as /boot/efi (#967918).
- Remove usage of the efivars module, and stop looking for /proc/efi. efivarfs is the current interface, and /proc/efi went away a long time ago.
partman-partitioning:
- Include ntfs-3g-udeb on arm64.
partman-target:
- Add a hint to the new fstab about using systemctl daemon-reload after changing /etc/fstab (#963573).
systemd:
- Install 60-block.rules in udev-udeb (#958397). The block device rules were split out from 60-persistent-storage.rules in v220. This fixes a longstanding bug where UUIDs would not be used for filesystems on initial installation.
util-linux:
- Take over eject-udeb (#737658).
win32-loader:
- Introduce UEFI boot manager and Secure Boot support (#918863).

Hardware support changes

debian-cd:
- Enable graphical installer for arm64.
- Exclude lilo-installer and elilo-installer udebs for all archs.
- Stop making XFCE single CD images.
- Stop making DVD ISO images 2 and 3 for amd64/i386 (they are still available via jigdo).
debian-installer:
- Update Firefly-RK3288 image for new u-boot version.
- [arm64] Add support for firefly-rk3399, pinebook-pro-rk3399, rockpro64-rk3399, rock64-rk3328 and rock-pi-4-rk3399 to u-boot images and netboot SD card images.
- [arm64] Make all netboot sdcard images start at offset 32768, for compatibility with rockchip platforms.
- Add OLPC XO-1.75 laptop support (#949306).
- Enable GTK build for arm64.
- Add support for NanoPi NEO Air (#928863).
- Add wireless-regdb-udeb to Linux builds that include nic-wireless-modules.
- efi-image: Improve sizing calculation to reduce wasted space.
- efi-image: Include DTB files in the ESP for armhf and arm64 systems. This should make U-Boot based systems work better when booting via UEFI.
flash-kernel:
- Add FriendlyARM NanoPi NEO Plus2 (#955374).
- Add Pinebook (#930098).
- Add Pinebook Pro.
- Add Olimex A64-Olinuxino and A64-Olinuxino-eMMC (#931195).
- Add SolidRun LX2160A Honeycomb and Clearfog CX (#958023).
- Add SolidRun Cubox-i Solo/DualLite variants (#939261).
- Add Turris MOX (#961303).
linux:
- Move any compression modules to kernel-image udeb; drop compress-modules udeb.
- Make input-modules udeb depend on crc-modules.
- [arm64] Add i2c_mv64xxx to i2c-modules udeb.
- [arm64] Add drivers/pinctrl to kernel-image udeb.
- [arm64] Add analogix-anx6345, pwm-sun4i, sun4i-drm and sun8i-mixer to fb-modules udeb.
- [arm64] Add pwm-sun4i to fb-modules udeb.
- [arm64] Add armada_37xx_wdt to kernel-image udeb (#961086).
- [mips*] Drop hfs-modules udeb.
- [x86] Add crc32_pclmul to crc-modules udeb.
- Add crc32_generic to crc-modules udeb.
- Reverse order of cdrom-core and isofs/udf udebs: the latter ones now require the former.
- Drop zlib-modules udeb (zlib_deflate is now always built-in).
- Add f2fs-modules udeb.

Localization status

78 languages are supported in this release.
New languages: Kabyle, Occitan.
Full translation for 16 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.