Secure Boot support might not land in the final release

Apr 28, 2017 16:07 GMT  ·  By

Debian Project's Steve McIntyre and Jonathan Wiltshire just informed the Debian GNU/Linux community about some of the important aspects of the upcoming Debian GNU/Linux 9 "Stretch" operating system, whose launch is imminent.

The first aspect, revealed by Debian developer Jonathan Wiltshire, is that the final release of Debian GNU/Linux 9 "Stretch" might not include Secure Boot support, which is no longer a blocker to launch the forthcoming OS. However, Secure Boot support could be implemented sometime during the lifetime of Debian 9.

"We appreciate that this will be a disappointment to many users and developers. However, we need to balance that with the limited time available for the volunteer teams working on this feature, and the risk of bugs being introduced through rushed development," said Jonathan Wiltshire in a mailing list announcement.

Live images now including UEFI support

On the other hand, Debian developer and team lead of "debian-cd" Steve McIntyre reports today that Debian GNU/Linux 9 "Stretch" will be available as Blu-Ray (for amd64 and i386 architectures) and DVD-sized images (for all architectures), as CD sets will no longer be produced.

Furthermore, almost all of the desktop-specific CD images with KDE, Xfce, LXDE, etc. will be dropped when Debian GNU/Linux 9 "Stretch" launches next month, except for the "netinst" images and a single CD that lets users install the operating system with the lightweight Xfce desktop environment.

The good news is that the weekly Live images are making a comeback, and they ship with UEFI (Unified Extensible Firmware Interface) support. They'll be available for both 64-bit and 32-bit architectures, one for each of the desktop environments supported by the Debian Project.

Official cloud images of Debian GNU/Linux 9 "Stretch" will be produced as well, with OpenStack on ARM64 (AArch64), along with some unofficial live and netinst images offering non-free firmware for those who won't be able to install the OS on their exotic hardware. The third Release Candidate of the Debian Installer is out for early adopters.