Developers have also added a tool for choosing other desktop environments during the installation process

Oct 6, 2014 09:24 GMT  ·  By

The Debian Installer Team has announced that Debian Installer Jessie Beta 2 is out and ready for download. This latest version brings some very interesting changes for Jessie and a ton of improvements.

The Debian installer is always launched first, so if you want to test the latest Debian 8 version, you will have to install it. There is no Live CD, which means that you will need to have a lot of patience. From what we've seen so far, Debian Jessie Beta 2 was worth the wait.

Unlike regular Debian versions, which are pretty dull and usually only about small fixes, the Beta ones are much more exciting. This is where the action is and where all the new features are added.

GNOME is making a comeback

Many users didn't know that, for a while GNOME, had been replaced by Xfce as the default desktop environment for the latest Jessie branch. Since the first Beta for Debian 8 was made available, there have been some debates regarding this particular choice and now GNOME is back in play.

It's not like other desktop environments will be hard to use with Debian. In fact, one of the main features of this latest version is a list of DE choices that is provided in tasksel. This makes the installation of any desktop environment very easy and quite handy. It still needs some work, but the option is there.

The developers have also said that the Arm64 and ppc64el architectures have received support, the PXE boot images built for kfreebsd have been corrected, the UEFI-based systems are now detected as "efi" subarch, a bunch of new sound drivers have been added to the sound-modules package, and a lot of other smaller fixes and improvements have been made.

Debian Jessie doesn't have a release date yet and it will be a while until it is out. From the looks of it, if nothing out of the ordinary happens, GNOME will be the default desktop environment. The only question that remains right now is what version of the GNOME it will be. The 3.14 branch will soon land, but maybe they will manage to get 3.14.1 or even 3.14.2 ready by the time of the feature freeze.

More details about this release can be found in the official announcement. You can download Debian Jessie Beta 2 right now from Softpedia. This is still a work in progress, so it's very likely that you will encounter bugs or various problems.