The Debian developers have released the first alpha version of the installer for the upcoming Debian 7, code-named "Wheezy". The release of the final version of Debian 7.0 is planned for the beginning of 2013.

The first alpha of the installer brings support for the ARM architecture and WPA authentication for wireless connections. The standard file system will be ext4; Btrfs can now be used for the boot partition. Wheezy will also feature a kernel from the 3.2 series, which has been declared a long term support kernel and is being maintained by a Debian developer.

Debian 7.0 is expected to go into feature freeze in the middle of June. From that point onwards, the only changes to the Wheezy packages are intended to be bug fixes.

The developers have called upon users to start testing the alpha version of the installer and images using the new version are available from the Debian project's web site. As with all in-development software it should not be used on production systems as data loss is possible and should be expected. The most recent stable release of Debian is version 6.0, "Squeeze", available from the Debian download page.

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