14 DAY TRIAL // The Debian Installer Team announces that Debian Installer Jessie Beta 1 has been released and is now available for download.
The Debian installer seems like a big deal, but in fact it's just a way to install Debian without all the Live perks. In fact, if you download one of the ISO images for the Debian Installer Jessie Beta 1, you will see that you can only perform the installation and there is no Live option.
The installer is always the first to launch, but it will be followed soon by the Live edition for this first Beta. As you would expect, lots of new features and changes have made their way into this release.
According to the changelog, kfreebsd-9 has been replaced with kfreebsd-10, a number of parted_server functions have been dropped, the keyboard question on file preseed has been enabled again, and the Linux kernel has been upgraded to version 3.14.15.
This last upgrade of the Linux kernel is not really representative of the final version. Very soon, the developers will move to Linux kernel 3.16, which is their goal. A stable release of this kernel is already out, so it's just a matter of time.
Also, support has been added for mipsel/loongson-3, QNAP HS-210, D-Link DNS-320, and some dtb files for armhf and armel/kirkwood, support for armhf/efikamx (no longer supported upstream) has been dropped, the support for armhf/efikamx (no longer supported upstream) has been dropped, the MMC and NIC modules for BeagleBone Black have been added to udebs, virtio-modules udeb have been implemented, BRCMFMAC and BRCMFMAC_SDIO have been enabled as modules, the sb1a-bcm91480b flavor has been removed, and the support for powerpc has been dropped as well.
The developers also explain that a number of problems have been fixed. For example, the GNOME installation images have been fixed and they should now really install GNOME (instead of Xfce), a major parted release has been merged, the default init system on Linux is now systemd, and much more.
Debian Jessie doesn't have a release date yet and it will be a while until it is released. In the meantime, developers have changed the default desktop environment from GNOME to Xfce, they have adopted system, and they have replaced upstart.
More details about this release can be found in the official announcement. You can download Debian Jessie Beta 1 right now from Softpedia.
Remember that this is a development version and it should NOT be installed on production machines. It is intended for testing purposes only.