14 DAY TRIAL // Work on the next major version of the Debian GNU/Linux operating system is ongoing since early July, a couple of weeks after the Debian GNU/Linux 9 "Stretch" series arrived, and it now looks like it's already in Alpha stages of development.
Debian developer Cyril Brulebois was pleased to announce on behalf of the Debian Installer Team that the first Alpha release of the installer for the Debian GNU/Linux 10 "Buster" operating system is out and it's ready for public testing if you want to install and use this development release on your personal computer.
The big changes since Debian GNU/Linux 9 "Stretch" are support for the Linux 4.12 kernel series, the implementation of a sshd user to support privilege separation for recent OpenSSH releases, the ability for partman-auto-raid to use a logical volume as /boot when the "partman-auto-lvm/no_boot=" option is set as "true."
For systems shipping with the boot firmware on a mmcblk device, Debian GNU/Linux 10 "Buster" Installer will make sure the firmware area is fully protected against any damages that may occur during guided partitioning. For screen support, the Debian Installer will now create a /run partition on non-linux, through rootskel.
A systemd issue related to the missing 60-input-id.rules in udev-udeb, which broke the graphical version of the Debian Installer, was fixed as well in this first Alpha release for Debian 10 Buster, along with a major bug in /etc/shadow for the live installer. In the win32-loader, all mirror URLs were replaced with deb.debian.org.
Hardware improvements
On the hardware side of things, the Debian GNU/Linux 10 "Buster" Alpha 1 Installer adds database entries for several single-board computers (SBCs), including Raspberry Pi 3 Model B, BeagleBone Green, Radxa Rock 2 Square, Firefly-RK3399, Banana Pi BPI-M2-Plus, FriendlyARM NanoPi NEO Air,, FriendlyArm NanoPi M1, NextThing C.H.I.P. Pro, Xunlong Orange Pi Zero, and Lichee Pi Zero.
The grub-installer now supports JBOD systems that have a large number of disk drives, support for the MIPS64el (MIPS 64-bit Little Endian) architecture was dropped, and it's now possible for the Debian Installer to check the "isa" field for MIPS architectures, which can later be used as a fallback for unknown processors. Lastly, sunxi_wdt was added to kernel-image and dm-raid to md-modules.
For Arndale development boards and other ARM64 or ARMhf computers, the Debian Installer now ships with the usb3503 module in usb-modules. You can download the Debian GNU/Linux 10 "Buster" Alpha 1 Installer through SVN if you want to install the operating system and take it for a spin on your personal computer. Be aware though that this is a pre-release build in early stages of development.