This page is used to prepare the next release announcement to be send to debian-boot and debian-devel-announce mailing lists.
Title: Debian Installer Wheezy Alpha1 release
The Debian Installer team is pleased to announce the first alpha release of the installer for Debian Wheezy.
Improvements in this release of the installer
- Network configuration:
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 2.6.37.
- Default filesystem changed to Ext4.
- Operating system probing:
- Detect Haiku on BeFS partitions
- 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 (DebianBug: 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
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.
Hardware support changes
- Support AMD CPU family 20. (LP: #676838)
Add support for Buffalo Linkstation LiveV3 (LS-CHL). (612167)
- Add support for Buffalo Linkstation Mini (LS-WSGL).
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 do 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.
Blockers for final release
- If you know any other please add it for review.
6.0.1 targeted bugs
Update to 2.6.32-30 (fixes 610561).
Update tasksel with fixes of 2.89 (fixes 610790, 611951 and 611937).
Good to have fixed
- If you know any other please add it for review.