14 DAY TRIAL // The Debian Installer team, through Cyril Brulebois, is pleased to announce today, April 10, 2017, the immediate availability of the third Release Candidate of the installer for the upcoming Debian GNU/Linux 9 "Stretch" operating system.
It's been a little over two months since the release of the second Release Candidate of the Debian Stretch Installer on the first days of February, which means that the Debian Installer development team had a lot of time on their hands to implement as many improvements as possible, as well as to fix most of the remaining bugs.
It won't be long until the launch of Debian GNU/Linux 9 "Stretch," so this third Release Candidate could be one of the last steps in the development cycle of the upcoming operating system, which should hit the streets at the end of April or in early May if everything goes according to plan and no critical blockers are found.
NETGEAR ReadyNAS Duo v2 and TI OMAP4 PandaBoard-ES supported
There are a lot of changes implemented in the Debian Installer Stretch RC3 release, and among those that caught our attention we can mention the use of SHA256 for verifications in anna (anna's not nearly apt), uniform syslinux and EFI boot menus, and addition of speech synthesis entries for automated, rescue, and expert installs.
A pre-seedable way to skip disk erase was implemented in the partman-auto-crypto component, rootskel now avoids to register options for non-modules, fb-modules were added to various loongson-3 configurations, along with virtio modules to PPC (PowerPC) cdrom and netboot images, and support for special ports.
"Add support for ports which aren't scheduled to be released by looking at an extra unreleased suite where patched or port-specific components are made available, and use unstable instead of testing as a base suite. This fixes the long standing FTBFS on non-released ports," reads the mailing list announcement.
TI OMAP4 PandaBoard-ES, NETGEAR ReadyNAS Duo v2, and Hardkernel ODROID-C2 hardware are now officially supported, the installation of grub-xen should now work as expected in Xen environments, and PReP partitions are now better supported on PPC64el (PowerPC 64-bit Little Endian) architectures.
Other than that, Debian Installer Stretch RC3 adds more USB host and dual-role drivers to the usb-modules component, ast was added to fb-modules for ARM64 (AArch64), and bcache to md-modules. It also looks like spaces are now accepted in multipath WWID, and it's possible to resize NVM Express (NVMe) devices.
For Armel architectures, this third Release Candidate of the Debian Stretch Installer supports OpenRD targets by default. You can download the sources of Debian Installer Stretch RC3 right now through our website if you want to take it for a test drive, but remember that this is a pre-release version, not suitable for production use.