Some days ago Debian developers released the news about the tests that will begin on the first alpha version of the installer for the next Debian version. It is important to mention that as such this is not a pre-release version of Debian 11, it is simply an alpha version of the Debian installer (Debian Installer).
Since even though the current stable version of Debian 10 was released a few months ago, Debian developers are already working on the next version of Debian 11, which as such is initially a copy of Debian 10 Buster and actually It is in a testing state.
This means that it should not crash as frequently as "unstable or experimental" distributions, because packages are only allowed to become part of this distribution after a certain period of time has elapsed and as long as no critical flaws are logged against them. .
What changes does this alpha version of the Debian 11 installer introduce?
Some of the changes were announced on the Debian mailing lists that are built into this alpha version of the installer. Cyril Brulebois said the following:
"Time to start doing this: many components have been updated by replacing" cd "/" cd-rom "with" installation media "these changes are not individually documented below ... this also explains why many languages are not fully translated in this alpha version. "
This first alpha version of the Debian 11 installer "Bullseye" comes with various improvements and increased hardware support (taking as a comparison the current installer of the stable version of Debian 10) of these improvements DTB support for Rasperry Pi Compute Module 3 is highlighted, as well as support for virtio-gpu for graphical output on VM instances as well as support for the Olimex A20-OLinuXino-Lime2-eMMC.
Another change that stands out in this alpha version is in apt-setup, the in line generation of sources.list files has been redesigned for security related updates. The strings {dist} -updates are renamed to {dist} -security. In sources.list, it is allowed to separate "[]" blocks with multiple spaces.
On the other hand, installation of intermediate package apt-transport-https has stopped, creating the file my-at-spi-dbus-bus.desktop in user profile has stopped (at-spi2-core now always starts at-spi bus).
The default host for the mirrors themselves is "deb.debian.org", the parameter gfxpayload = keep was configured in the bootloader submenu, which resolves issues with garbled fonts on HiDPI displays when uploading images for network installation via EFI.
Of the other changes that are highlighted in the announcement are:
- Documentation converted to DocBook XML 4.5 format.
- Grub2 added module definitions for images signed for UEFI.
- Package installation is provided cryptsetup-initramfs instead of cryptsetup.
- Added support for ARM Olimex A20-OLinuXino-Lime2-eMMC board.
- Mini.iso provides network boot mode in EFI for ARM platform.
- To be able to allow the installation of packages to support virtualization systems when the visualization is detected.
- The netcfg template was reformulated as some DHCP clients are no longer available.
- The thermal_sys has been added to the Linux kernel image.
- Currently 76 languages are supported by this alpha version of the Debian 11 installer
And last but not least, we can also find in this alpha version of the Debian installer that images are removed from QNAP TS-11x / TS-21x / HS-21x, QNAP TS-41x / TS-42x, and HP Media Vault mv2120 devices Due to size issues with the Linux kernel, developers are also continuing to transition to Python 3 by removing outdated Python 2 packages.
Finally, if you want to know more about the changes that are integrated In this alpha version of the Debian 11 installer, you can check the details In the following link.
In addition, the release of the stable version of Debian 11 is expected in about one and a half to two years.