Debian Installer 7.0 Alpha1 release

May 13th, 2012

The Debian Installer team is pleased to announce the first alpha release of the installer for Debian 7.0 Wheezy .

Improvements in this release of the installer

Network configuration

Add WPA support to installer (#327309).

Improvements in link detection and DHCP configuration, which should improve reliability for systems with flaky network cards (#496647, #414117, #606515).

Release DHCP lease at the end of the install, to work around problems with non-RFC compliant DHCP servers (#610553).

The requirements for hostnames have been clarified, and the parser tightened up to avoid letting through some really dodgy names (#399071).

Added Spanning Tree Protocol (STP) support.

Linux Specific

Kernel version has been updated to 3.2.16.

Default filesystem changed to ext4.

Allow Btrfs /boot partition (GRUB 2 and LILO).

Add support for Network Block Devices (NBD).

kFreeBSD Specific

Kernel updated to version 8.3.

Option to use new 9.0 kernel during install.

Operating system probing

Add detection for Windows 8, support for BSD systems, MeeGo, Linux From Scratch and Haiku on BeFS partitions.

Improve Windows and MS-DOS detection.

Fix Gentoo detection on OS probing.

Win32-loader

Add PXE functionality (#607417).

USB stick installs

Add choice of ISO image to use when multiple images are found on the installation medium (#564441). This includes a full rewrite of the state machine in the iso-scan component. This work was contributed by Frans Pop and Frédéric Boiteux.

Translations

New language supported: Uyghur.

Behavioral changes in this release

Make sure to put "hda" into the CoLo config file instead of "sda" since CoLo only knows about the former (#614839).

Remove 5 second sleeps when debootstrap finds additional required dependencies. d-i just got that much faster.

Use SHA checksums.

Re-enable ZFS on kfreebsd-i386.

Support for mirror and striped ZFS as root filesystem (without separate /boot).

Mirror and RAID-Z support on ZFS filesystems.

Redesign ZFS pool management, new features include: Support for pools with multiple physical devices. Support for multiple filesystems within a ZFS pool. Support for legacy filesystems using ZFS volumes (ZVOL). Arbitrary names for ZFS pools, filesystems and ZVOLs.

Switch espeakup language around language selection (#630477).

Hardware support changes

Add support for: Buffalo Linkstation LiveV3 (LS-CHL) (#612167). Buffalo Linkstation Mini (LS-WSGL). Toshiba AC100. MX53 LOCO board. OMAP4 Pandora. armhf architecture. Genesi Efika MX nettops and smarttops (#612376).

Blacklist snd-aoa to allow snd-powermac to work.

Install mmc-modules if no disk is found, since some devices may not have hard drives, but SD slots instead (#593108).

Increase the number of attempts to detect new disk devices on some SCSI subsystems with long driver/disk initialization time (#611314).

Include ahci module for the QNAP TS-419P+ (#613497).

Add niu network driver for sparc, needed by T2+ Sparc systems (#608516).

Recognize /dev/duart* as a serial console.

Known issues in this release

See the errata for details and a full list of known issues.

Not yet known issues in 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.