The Debian Installer team had the pleasure of announcing on March 27 that the second Release Candidate (RC) version of the Debian 8.0 "Jessie" installer is now available for download and testing. The RC2 version of the installer brings a great number of improvements and fixes.

Debian 8 Jessie Installer RC2 now enables the GRUB beep at boot for blind users, keeps track of even more packages in Built-Using, addresses issues with the default keyboard layout for many languages, fixes a possible segfault when installing Debian 8 on armel/armhf hardware, and removes the pm-utils package from the laptop and desktop tasks.

Additionally, the libgl1-mesa-dri package has been removed from the desktop task, and installs the LibreOffice-gtk package along Orca in order to make the LibreOffice office suite more accessible. The RC2 release of the Debian 8 Jessie installer now enables TTY (Teletype) 2 to 6 even if D-Bus is not installed, and enables only the desktop that is is preseeded.

The new Debian 8 Installer release brings great hardware support

The Debian 8 Jessie Installer Release Candidate 2 brings great hardware support, such as the ability to run a 64-bit Linux kernel on a 32-bit EFI (Extensible Firmware Interface), support for OMAP5432 uEVM, support for Buffalo Linkstation LS-XHL/LS-CHLv2, adds u-boot binaries for armhf systems that don’t have u-boot in flash, and supports Bay Trail systems.

It repairs the console baudrate mismatch that affected various i.MX6-based systems, adds DTB for Olimex A20-OLinuXino-LIME2, enables numerous ALSA drivers as mobules in the kernel, introduces support for the Bananapro board, and backports support for A20-OLinuXino-LIME2 and LeMaker Banana Pro board in u-boot.

Lastly, the second Release Candidate of the Debian 8 Jessie installer now supports 75 languages, with only 19 of them fully translated. Download the Debian 8 Jessie RC2 Installer right now from Softpedia, but keep in mind that this is an unstable software and it is not recommended to be used for installing Debian 8 on production machines.