Published on Tux Machines (http://www.tuxmachines.org) Home > content > Debian Installer Bullseye Alpha 3 Released and More Debian News Debian Installer Bullseye Alpha 3 Released and More Debian News By Roy Schestowitz Created 06/12/2020 - 9:51pm Submitted by Roy Schestowitz on Sunday 6th of December 2020 09:51:32 PM Filed under Debian [1] Debian Installer Bullseye Alpha 3 release [2] The Debian Installer team[1] is pleased to announce the third alpha release of the installer for Debian 11 "Bullseye". Improvements in this release ============================ * apt-setup: - Remove mention of volatile repo from generated sources.list file (#954460). * base-installer: - Improve test architecture, adding support for Linux 5.x versions. * brltty: - Improve hardware detection and driver support. * cdebconf: - Make text interface report progress more accurately: from the very beginning, and also as soon as an answer to a question has been given. * choose-mirror: - Update Mirrors.masterlist. * console-setup: - Improve support for box-drawing characters (#965029). - Sync Terminus font with the xfonts-terminus package. - Fix Lithuanian layout (#951387). * debian-cd: - Only include Linux udebs for the latest ABI, making small installation images more useful. * debian-installer: - Bump Linux kernel ABI to 5.9.0-4 - Drop fontconfig tweaks introduced in the Debian Installer Buster Alpha 1 release (See: #873462). - Install kmod-udeb instead of libkmod2-udeb. - Mimick libgcc1 handling, for libgcc-s1. - Clean up the list of fake packages. - Replace the mklibs library reduction pass with a hack, copying libgcc_s.so.[124] from the host filesystem for the time being. - Add explicit build-depends on fdisk on arm64, amd64 and i386 now that util-linux doesn't depend on it anymore. - Add grub2 to built-using (#968998). - Fix FTBFS with fakeroot by adjusting the /dev/console check (see #940056). * debian-installer-utils: - Adjust fetch-url's use of file descriptors for recent udev versions (#967546). * debootstrap: - Only install apt-transport-https on stretch and earlier, HTTPS support was merged into the core apt package for buster (#920255, #879755). * finish-install: - Drop upstart support entirely (#923845). * fonts-noto: - Fix Sinhala support in the installer (#954948). * grub-installer: - Update templates, to make them fit for UEFI systems and new kind of system storage media (#954718). * kmod: - Split kmod-udeb off of libkmod2-udeb and actually ship the libraries in libkmod2-udeb (#953952). * locale-chooser: - Activate new languages: Kabyle, Occitan. * partman-auto: - Bump /boot sizes in most recipes from between 128 and 256M to between 512 and 768M (#893886, #951709). - Import partman-auto/cap-ram support from Ubuntu, to allow capping RAM size as used for swap partition calculations (#949651, #950344). This allows us to cap the minimum size of swap partitions size to 1*CAP, and their maximum size to a maximum of 2 or 3*CAP depending on architecture. Default is set to 1024, thus capping swap partitions to between 1 and 3GB. * partman-efi: - Remount /cdrom read-write if it also happens to be used as /boot/efi (#967918). - Remove usage of the efivars module, and stop looking for /proc/efi. efivarfs is the current interface, and /proc/efi went away a long time ago. * partman-partitioning: - Include ntfs-3g-udeb on arm64. * partman-target: - Add a hint to the new fstab about using `systemctl daemon-reload` after changing /etc/fstab (#963573). * systemd: - Install 60-block.rules in udev-udeb (#958397). The block device rules were split out from 60-persistent-storage.rules in v220. This fixes a longstanding bug where UUIDs would not be used for filesystems on initial installation. * util-linux: - Take over eject-udeb (#737658). * win32-loader: - Introduce UEFI boot manager and Secure Boot support (#918863). Hardware support changes ======================== * debian-cd: - Enable graphical installer for arm64. - Exclude lilo-installer and elilo-installer udebs for all archs. - Stop making XFCE single CD images. - Stop making DVD ISO images 2 and 3 for amd64/i386 (they are still available via jigdo). * debian-installer: - Update Firefly-RK3288 image for new u-boot version. - [arm64] Add support for firefly-rk3399, pinebook-pro-rk3399, rockpro64-rk3399, rock64-rk3328 and rock-pi-4-rk3399 to u-boot images and netboot SD card images. - [arm64] Make all netboot sdcard images start at offset 32768, for compatibility with rockchip platforms. - Add OLPC XO-1.75 laptop support (#949306). - Enable GTK build for arm64. - Add support for NanoPi NEO Air (#928863). - Add wireless-regdb-udeb to Linux builds that include nic-wireless-modules. - efi-image: Improve sizing calculation to reduce wasted space. - efi-image: Include DTB files in the ESP for armhf and arm64 systems. This should make U-Boot based systems work better when booting via UEFI. * flash-kernel: - Add FriendlyARM NanoPi NEO Plus2 (#955374). - Add Pinebook (#930098). - Add Pinebook Pro. - Add Olimex A64-Olinuxino and A64-Olinuxino-eMMC (#931195). - Add SolidRun LX2160A Honeycomb and Clearfog CX (#958023). - Add SolidRun Cubox-i Solo/DualLite variants (#939261). - Add Turris MOX (#961303). * linux: - Move any compression modules to kernel-image udeb; drop compress-modules udeb. - Make input-modules udeb depend on crc-modules. - [arm64] Add i2c_mv64xxx to i2c-modules udeb. - [arm64] Add drivers/pinctrl to kernel-image udeb. - [arm64] Add analogix-anx6345, pwm-sun4i, sun4i-drm and sun8i-mixer to fb-modules udeb. - [arm64] Add pwm-sun4i to fb-modules udeb. - [arm64] Add armada_37xx_wdt to kernel-image udeb (#961086). - [mips*] Drop hfs-modules udeb. - [x86] Add crc32_pclmul to crc-modules udeb. - Add crc32_generic to crc-modules udeb. - Reverse order of cdrom-core and isofs/udf udebs: the latter ones now require the former. - Drop zlib-modules udeb (zlib_deflate is now always built-in). - Add f2fs-modules udeb. Localization status =================== * 78 languages are supported in this release. * New languages: Kabyle, Occitan. * Full translation for 16 of them. Known bugs in this release ========================== * There seems to be no known major bug as of yet. See the errata[2] for details and a full list of known issues. Feedback for this release ========================= We need your help to find bugs and further improve the installer, so please try it. Installation images, and everything else you will need are available at our web site[3]. Thanks ====== The Debian Installer team thanks everybody who has contributed to this release. 1. https://wiki.debian.org/DebianInstaller/Team 2. https://www.debian.org/devel/debian-installer/errata 3. https://www.debian.org/devel/debian-installer Cheers, Debian Installer Bullseye Alpha 3 Switches To Linux 5.9, Larger /boot - Phoronix[3] While the Debian 11 "Bullseye" freezes don't get started until January, the Debian Installer for Bullseye has been in alpha for just over a year. Today marks the third alpha release of the Debian Installer for Bullseye. Notable with this alpha update is switching over to the Linux 5.9.0-4 kernel. Linux 5.9 is currently the latest stable kernel series. We'll see if Linux 5.10 ends up making it into Debian 11 "Bullseye" especially as this will be a Long-Term Support (LTS) kernel release maintained for a period of at least five years, so presumably they will try to align on this kernel version for Bullseye. Offsite backups to rsync.net from an Asustor NAS [4] I have an Asustor (Nimbuster 4 / AS5304T) NAS at home, which allows me to perform regular backups. Unfortunately, I couldn't manage to find a way to configure remote backups from the NAS to rsync.net using the "Remote Sync" option of the "Backup & Restore" app provided in the ADM OS of the Asustor NAS. I'm used to using rsync -e ssh commands and would have expected some such configuration to be possible... it may just be some UI issue, but I couldn't find how to add one for rsync.net. Thorsten Alteholz: My Debian Activities in November 2020 [5] Unfortunately a day only has 24h. As the freeze is approaching, I had to concentrate a bit more on keeping my packages in shape. So this month I only accepted nine packages. The good news, I rejected no package. The overall number of packages that got accepted was 328. Debian Source URL: http://www.tuxmachines.org/node/145139 Links: [1] http://www.tuxmachines.org/taxonomy/term/141 [2] https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2020/12/msg00001.html [3] https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Debian-11-Installer-Alpha-3 [4] http://www.olivierberger.com/weblog/index.php?post/2020/12/06/Offsite-backups-to-rsync.net-from-an-Asustor- NAS [5] http://blog.alteholz.eu/2020/12/my-debian-activities-in-november-2020/.