Debian Project's Cyril Brulebois was pleased to announce earlier this week the availability of the second alpha release of the installer for the upcoming Debian GNU/Linux 10 "Buster" operating system.

The Debian Installer Buster Alpha 2 release comes with a few important changes, such as the addition of the unattended-upgrades package by default through the pkgsel component to ensure the automatic installation of security upgrades, as well as the addition of the installation images for the mips64el architecture.

Another important change in this second alpha release of the Debian GNU/Linux 10 "Buster" Installer is that the Linux 4.13 kernel series is now supported for new installations, though you should know it reached end of life last month, so we believe the third alpha of Debian Installer will support Linux kernel 4.14 LTS.

In addition, there's also support for building the operating system against snapshot.debian.org to help with the debugging of regressions, and the Debian Installer Buster can now handle serial console configuration for the systemd init system. The update-initramfs calls have been optimized with a temporary shim.

Syslinux now supports the EXT4 64-bit feature

On the hardware support side of things, the Debian Installer Buster Alpha 2 release brings support for new single-board computers, including A20-OLinuXino-LIME2-eMMC, FriendlyArm NanoPi M1 Plus, Marvell Armada 8040 DB, Marvell 8040 MACHIATOBin, Olimex, SolidRun HummingBoard, and Solo/DualLite.

It also adds udebs to the hd-media image to ensure the detection of the ISO images in LVM logical volumes, and adds support for the EXT4 64-bit feature to the Syslinux bootloader. Lastly, a total of 75 languages are now supported in the Debian Installer for Debian GNU/Linux 10 "Buster," which you can try right now by downloading the sources from the official repositories.