The Debian Project, through Cyril Brulebois, has announced earlier today that the first Alpha build of the Debian GNU/Linux 9 "Stretch" Installer is now available for download and testing.

Among the most important changes implemented in the Debian 9 "Stretch" Alpha 1 Installer, we can mention support for the Linux 4.0 kernel series and the fact that the graphical mode has been enabled by default instead of the text mode, which is still fully functional.

Additionally, the default hardware architecture is now 64-bit (amd64) on the multi-arch image instead of 32-bit (i386), and ifnames is now being used by default for network interface names on both the installer and the installed system instead of mac.

Of course, there are many other improvements implemented in the first Alpha build of the Debian GNU/Linux 9 "Stretch" Installer, such as support for text shortcuts in cdebconf-text-udeb, better support for Nokia N900 in console-setup, support for preseeding RAID10 in partman-md.

Co-installable desktop tasks for Xfce and GNOME, as well as dictionary adjustments for various languages in tasksel have also been brought. A warning will be displayed for bootable mediums created with UNetbootin, the acpi, acpid, and acpi-support-base packages will no longer be installed, and the issues with preseeded language code checks have been fixed.

"The Debian Installer team is pleased to announce the first alpha release of the installer for Debian 9 'Stretch,'" says Cyril Brulebois. "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 website. The Debian Installer team thanks everybody who has contributed to this release."

Hardware support has been improved

In addition to the many changes mentioned above, the first Alpha build of the Debian GNU/Linux 9 "Stretch" Installer adds DTB support for many boards, including OpenRD Base, Client and Ultimate, SheevaPlug, SheevaPlug eSATA and GuruPlug, LaCie NAS, and QNAP NAS, as well as support for Seagate Dockstar.

Support for D-Link DNS-323 and Conceptronic CH3SNAS has been removed because of size limitations, u-boot configurations have been adjusted to support hummingboard-i2ex and hummingboard-i1 in MX6_Cubox-i, and all Wandboard variants, including Dual-Lite, Solo, and Quad. There are also device tree variants for supported kirkwood and armel devices.

Last but not least, the sound-modules have received more drivers, PCI support has been enabled for ARM64 architectures, including all the related modules, the usb-modules have received an ehci-orion module, the nic-modules have received a stmmac-platform module, the usb-modules have gotten xhci-plat-hcd and xhci-pci, and device tree variants of QNAP NAS devices are now recognized.